argument essay on utopian society

Essays About Utopia: Top 6 Examples and 9 Prompts

Struggling to write essays about utopia? Our essay examples about utopia plus prompts will be useful in your writing journey. 

Utopia refers to an imaginary world where perfect societies are created. Translated as “no place” in Greek, the term was coined by English Statesman Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book “Utopia.” In More’s Utopia, a political satire, people share the same ways of life and live in harmony.

Utopia in various contexts has been used to define a perfect society that has served as the foundation of several ideologies. However, it has also been slammed for propelling people to strive for the impossible and dismiss realities on the ground. Various schools of thought have risen to improve on the utopian concept.

6 Helpful Essay Examples

1. utopian thinking: the easy way to eradicate poverty by rutger bregman, 2. the schools of utopia by john dewey, 3. metaverse: utopia for virtual business opportunities right now by noah rue, 4. saudi’s neom is dystopia portrayed as utopia by edwin heathcote, 5. streaming utopia: imagining digital music’s perfect world by marc hogan, 6. what’s the difference between utopia, eutopia, and protopia by hanzi freinacht, 1. describe your utopia, 2. my utopian vacation, 3. what is utopian literature, 4. utopia vs. dystopia in movies, 5. plato on utopia, 6. utopia of feminists, 7. dangers of utopian thinking, 8. utopia in capitalism, 9. your utopia for education.

“The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. The time has come for new, radical ideas. If this sounds utopian to you, then remember that every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy too.”

The article brings to light a utopian vision for eradicating poverty. This vision involves providing annual income to the poor. While such a scheme has drawn criticism over the possibility of dampening beneficiaries’ inclination to work. The essay cites the success of a Canadian field experiment that provided the entire town of Dauphin a monthly income for four years and helped ease poor living conditions. You might also be interested in these essays about Beowulf .

“The most Utopian thing in Utopia is that there are no schools at all. Education is carried on without anything of the nature of schools, or, if this idea is so extreme that we cannot conceive of it as educational at all, then we may say nothing of the sort at present we know as schools.”

John Dewey , an American philosopher, and education reformist, contested the old ways of schooling where rows of students recite and memorize lessons. In this speech, he illuminates the need for education to be a lived experience rather than confined within the four corners of a classroom. Check out these essays about freedom .

“The metaverse looks like a good business opportunity right now, but emerging markets are always volatile, and changing laws or regulations could turn the metaverse from a profitable utopia into a cash-guzzling dystopia for business.”

Businesses of all sizes are beginning to enter the metaverse. As with all pursuits, early movers are gaining the biggest advantage in carving out their niche in the utopian digital world. But despite the blazing popularity of the metaverse, a degree of caution must still be exercised as the virtual space is uncharted territory for sustainable business profitability. 

“The inside is, of course, rendered as a bucolic techno-utopia, a valley of trees and foliage, the new Babylon. This is the great contemporary cliché. No matter how huge the building, how hideous the ethics, everything can be concealed by a bit of greenery.”

Saudi and humanity’s biggest ambition for a future eco-city is a trillion-dollar city in the middle of a desert. But the ways to attain this utopian city might not live up to the rhetoric it has been selling, as its gigantic promises of free-flowing energy and technology haven’t accounted for their resulting environmental costs. 

“Many were happy with their current digital tools… and just wished for slight improvements, though they frequently expressed concern that artists should be getting a bigger cut of the profits.”

The essay interviews a handful of music nerds and junkies and asks them to describe their utopia in the music streaming world. Some were as ambitious as seeing an integration of music libraries and having all their music collections for free fit into their phones. 

“The Utopian believes in progress. The Eutopian believes in critique and a rediscovery of simpler wisdoms and relationships. The Protopian believes that progress can be enacted by understanding how the many critiques and rediscoveries of wisdom are interconnected into a larger whole.”

A political philosopher, Freinacht dissects the differences between utopia, eutopia, and protopia in modern and post-modern contexts. He concludes that protopia is the best way to go as it centers on the reality of daily progress and the beauty of listening to the diversity of human experiences.

9 Interesting Prompts To Begin Your Essays About Utopia

Describe your idea of a perfect world. You could start your essay with the common question of what you think would make the world a better place. Then, provide an ambitious answer, such as a world without poverty or violence. Next, explain why this is the one evil you would like to weed out from the world. Finally, provide background showing the gravity of the situation and why it needs urgent resolution.

For this essay, try to describe your ideal vacation as detailed and colorful as possible to the point that your readers feel they are pulled into your utopia. Pump out your creative juices by adding as many elements that can effectively and strikingly describe your ultimate paradise.

More’s Utopia was a great success among the elites of its time. The groundbreaking book gave way to a new genre: utopian literature. For this writing prompt, describe utopian literature and analyze what new perspectives such genre could offer. Cite famous examples such as More’s Utopia and describe the lessons which could be mused from these utopian novels. 

Dystopia is the opposite of utopia. In your essay, explain the differences od dystopia and utopia, then provide a brief historical summary of how each came about. Cite film examples for each genre and try to answer which of the two is the more popular today. Finally, investigate to understand why there is greater leaning toward this genre and how this genre feeds into the fantasies of today’s audience.

While Plato never used the word “utopia” since he lived long before its conception, Plato is credited for creating the first utopian literary work, The Republic . Summarize the utopia as described by Plato and analyze how his ideals figure in the modern world.  

Interview at least three feminists and ask them to describe what a utopia for feminists would look like and why this is their ideal world. How is society expected to behave in their ideal world? Then, consolidate their answers to build the backbone of your essay. You may also search for feminist utopia novels and compare the concepts of these novels to the answers of the feminists you interviewed.

Genocides made to forward extreme ideologies have been linked to utopian thinking. Identify the dangers of aiming for the perfect society and cite past incidents where groups committed heinous crimes to achieve their utopia. To conclude, offer viable solutions, including the proper mindset, realistic setting of boundaries, and actions that groups should carry out when striving to create change.

Greedy capitalism is blamed for a slew of problems facing today: environmental abuse, labor exploitation, and a gaping divide in income equality that is stoking dissatisfaction among many workers and compelling calls to tax the rich. For your essay, enumerate the problems of capitalism and the remedies being sought to direct the capitalist endeavors to more sustainable projects.

Beyond Dewey’s utopia for the educational system, write your wishlist for how learning should be built at schools. Your utopian school could implement any policy, from having minimal assignments to more educational field trips and challenging activities every day. Finally, explain how this could elevate the educational experience among students, back up your utopian goals with research that also recommends this setup for schools. When editing for grammar, we also recommend improving the readability score of a piece of writing before publishing or submitting. For more guidance, read our explainer on grammar and syntax .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

View all posts

• Skip to main content
• Skip to quick search
• Skip to global navigation

• Editorial Board
• Submissions

The debate about utopias from a sociological perspective [1]

Permissions : This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact [email protected] to use this work in a way not covered by the license.

For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy .

Abstract: This article provides a sociological perspective on the study of utopias and utopian thinking by focussing on the disciplinary assumptions of various major writers on the subject. The historians deploy a static and theoryless narrative code lacking a dynamic sense of social structure. Futurologists have made specific, but limited and risky, statistical predictions of future social trends. Sociologists have shown how modern socialist utopias presuppose that society is malleable and amenable to secular control. Others have speculated about the catalytic function of utopias in the face of the repressive Soviet regime. The social philosophers of the ‘Critical Theory’ school have justified the possibility of the socialist utopia through ever more complex transcendental arguments. The article doubts the cognitive value of the results and warns of the costs of striving to achieve the unachievable.

Keywords: Utopias, communism, socialism, Bauman, Elias, Apel

Introduction

The topics of the three sections of this paper are as follows.

• (a) Sociologists and historians : A manifesto for the sociological approach to the study of utopias. For this purpose I attempt a critique of the method employed in a standard historical work on the subject, Utopian Thought in the Western World by Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel (Manuel & Manuel 1979) in the light of recent English debates about the relationship between sociology and history. A comparison is also made of their historians’ account of the historical context of Thomas More’s Utopia with a sociological sketch of the same writer by Norbert Elias.
• (b) Sociology and utopia : A brief survey of some important trends in the English and American social-scientific literature on utopias, including para-sociological speculation and social philosophising, statistical futurology and theories of the catalytic function of utopias in societies, which develop problem areas first posited by Karl Mannheim. It focuses on the contributions of Ruth Levitas and Zygmunt Bauman.
• (c) The Marxian utopia: from history to logic : The centrality of the problem of the realisation of utopia, informed by a social-scientific theory of society, in the Marxist strand of socialist and communist thinking. Here I concentrate on the structure of assumptions in Marx’s theory itself (particularly its philosophical residues) which partly shaped later ‘neo-utopian’ work in this tradition into the postulation of idealised and unrealisable utopian states of affairs in society. The section concludes with a critique of that prominent theme in the ‘critical theory’ of Jürgen Habermas; in the Marxist humanism of Zygmunt Bauman; and in the rationalistic ‘new apriorism’ of Karl-Otto Apel.

The article does not contain an exhaustive survey of the sociological literature under those three headings, but a selection of important trends, themes and authors for the sake of discussion.

(a) Sociologists and historians

In British sociology at the present time [1981–2] there is considerable debate between historians and sociologists about the relationship between their disciplines. I think it would be fair to say that there has been something approaching a rapprochement between the disciplines, to a point where the division between them has become very blurred. Sociologists have conceded that they can learn a great deal from historians’ work as well as their craft skill of handling archive materials and the historians have agreed that their work produces the best explanatory results when they approach empirical materials with concepts. [2] Furthermore, in a large number of recent publications, social historians and historians of ideas and of art (for example Quentin Skinner (1969), John Dunn (1968), Peter Burke (1980), Arthur Marwick (1970), Peter Laslett (1968, 1977) and TJ Clark (1973a, 1973b, 1974)) the older tradition of history writing, which dealt with personages and events or traced disembodied ideas or art styles through history as though they had a life of their own, more-or-less unrelated to structured social developments, has been thoroughly discredited. Interdisciplinary co-operation and dialogue has perhaps gone furthest in the history, philosophy and sociology of science (for example, Mendelsohn, Weingart and Whitley (1977), Spiegel-Rösing and de Solla Price (1977)). The result of these developments is that many empirical works are being produced by historians which are, methodologically speaking at least, indistinguishable from sociology: for example, Laslett (1977) or Foster (1974). This is also obviously true of a number of Marxist studies of long-term developments in European societies (for example, Anderson 1974a, 1974b). The historian Peter Burke has summed up the present mood:

What some of us would like to see, what we are beginning to see, is a social history, or historical sociology – the distinction should become irrelevant – which would be concerned both with understanding from within and explaining from without; with the general and with the particular; and which would combine the sociologist’s acute sense of structure with the historian’s equally sharp sense of change (Burke 1980: 30).

In view of the dialogue between the disciplines taking place in British academic circles and its effect on historical scholarship, the compendious work by the historians Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel (Manuel & Manuel 1979) appears old-fashioned. I would not gainsay the pleasure one derives from its erudition, thoroughness, elegance and meticulous scholarship, nor its utility as a reference work. But from a sociological point of view it lacks both a sense of social structure and, more precisely, a theoretical framework guiding the selection of historical evidence. The study is avowedly pluralistic, considering utopias in Western history ‘from a number of points of view; geographical, psychological, sociological; as a form of belle-lettres; as philosophic-moral treatises; as a new mythology’ (Manuel & Manuel: 21). The authors continue: ‘we have tried to avoid the parochialism of exclusive disciplinary discourse by studying the same utopian constellation on many different levels’ (ibid). For the Manuels, a general theory of utopias would of necessity have to be that of a particular social science discipline, hence it would constitute a constricting and undesirable form of monism (ibid). They say that in studying a particular utopia the approach of each discipline contains ‘at least a grain of some meaning and truth’ (ibid).

The Manuels do not consider that the separation of aspects of human societies into the subject-matter of disciplines may relate more to their institutionalisation in universities than to the actual structure of societies (see Shils 1970). A general sociological theory can be constructed, however, which incorporates the fact that in observed social life the usually separated psychological, economic, political and cultural levels relate to each other concomitantly in human social relations. This theory would be a sociological one simply because the object of enquiry is human social relations (see Elias (2007 [1987]). (Although it is clear that interdisciplinary co-operation is necessary at this stage simply because institutional and professional specialisation exists.)

The authors’ empirical material is organised around seven ‘major utopian constellations’ or ‘configurations’ (Manuel & Manuel: 13) or chronological ‘clusters’ (Manuel & Manuel: 19) in Western history which are examined by reference to the writings of exemplars in the different countries. The seven constellations are:

• (i) Birth of utopia in the Renaissance and Reformation, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (More, Leonardo, Anabaptists);
• (ii) Seventeenth century (Pansophists, Campanella, Comenius);
• (iii) and (iv) Enlightenment (Rousseau, Turgot, Kant – at least two phases);
• (v) Utopian socialism early nineteenth century (Fourier, Saint-Simon);
• (vi) Marx and counter-Marx (including Engels, Comte); and
• (vii) Modern times (Darwin, Freud, Marcuse).

The authors’ data are the works of learned writers about utopias that is, ‘the utopian thought of the literate classes in Western society’ (Manuel & Manuel: 10). They specifically eschew trying to find out about the awareness of utopias in the consciousness of other groups. They suggest, however, that there is probably a seepage from the utopias of the educated people into the demands of popular action programmes (Manuel & Manuel: 9–10).

Lacking a general theory of society, however, the Manuels can only marvel at shifts in the social function of various utopias and in meanings of the term over time, without being able to explain systematically why they occur. For example, they write of the fate of the works of Thomas More, Marx and Comenius:

More’s Christian-humanist declamatio becomes a revolutionary manifesto; Marx’s notebooks [...] are read as a dogma a century later; Comenius’s massive systematic manuscript General Consultation on an Improvement of All Things Human [...] ends up as a mere historical curiosity [...] of interest to a limited number of specialists [...] The observer of utopia over a period of hundreds of years is constrained to consider each event as having roots in the past and sending out tentacles to the future and to coevals scattered over a broad area. No important utopian event is encapsulated or autonomous, because future history has embraced it (Manuel & Manuel: 25).

The questions a sociologist would ask here are why were these utopias taken up in different ways later? By which social groups? For what reasons? As part of what social conflicts? At what stage of social development? For what kinds of orientation? What was it about the social experiences of later generations that made these utopias seem to them appropriate and congruent? Why have some utopias lived on whilst others (like that of Comenius) disappeared? The authors have identified an interesting problem, but as historians they can only indicate the changing ideological functions of utopias in the vague and figurative terms of ‘tentacles to the future’ which are sometimes ‘embraced’ by ‘future history’. For an explanation of the dynamic of utopian thinking and acting, their theory-less stance inevitably drives them to a form of philosophical anthropology, which in some places borders on mysticism. One casual remark is very significant. They mention in passing the interesting fact of the absence of a sustained, indigenous tradition of utopianism in Spain. There are a couple of exceptions, one of whom is Don Quixote. To him, they suggest incredibly, ‘a free-floating utopian affect may have somehow attached itself’ (Manuel & Manuel: 14).

To develop this point, their general explanation for the recurrence of utopias is a postulated pervasive ‘utopian propensity’ which is manifested in the various writers in the constellations the origin of which is, they claim equally incredibly, ‘not knowable’ (Manuel & Manuel: 13). The recurrence and longevity of certain mythic themes in utopian writing and the perennial fascination of people with utopias over the centuries, may be because utopias evoke ‘associations remote and deeply rooted in Western consciousness’ (ibid). The authors refer in particular to the Judeo-Christian other-worldly belief in paradise and the Hellenic myth of an ideal city on earth, which ‘flowed together in the underthought of Western utopia’ (Manuel & Manuel: 33), becoming fused in the age of the Renaissance and continuing after that through the other constellations. [3] When the authors try to bring together in their historical analysis the level of a continuity of belief and the level of the social dynamics of a given society, they can only produce the following loose characterisation:

Historical analysis involves recognition of the persistence of symbolic and residual utopian forms, as well as consciousness of the “hot” motivation, generated by immediate socio-economic, political, or philosophic-religious dissatisfaction and anguish (Manuel & Manuel: 13).

As before, the authors have located an important problem, but in an unhelpful terminology. That is, how we can deal in our enquiries with the complex interplay between the social structure of the particular stage of development of the society concerned and the continuum of relatively autonomous forms of consciousness, knowledge and culture available to people at that stage, which are neither completely reducible to the circumstances, nor completely transcendent of them.

Hence, some conceptual clarification is necessary to sort out the levels implied in the Manuels’ prose. The term ‘underthought’ needs to be clarified and differentiated, so that one can more easily determine what exactly is the social process whereby specified basic features in Western thinking have become so deeply sedimented, if they have. How can we translate the strange term ‘hot motivation’ into more precise sociological terminology applicable to actual social relations? Without this kind of careful conceptual work, there is no adequate way to organise the data of the phenomenon of continuity that the authors are tracing. Consequently, there is always the temptation, in the absence of a systematic explanation, to fall back into an arbitrary, quasi-mystical one.

In the following passage we see that the Manuels express (imprecisely) their awareness that people learn mystic symbols; but the authors remain equivocal about whether the ‘utopian fantasies’ are timeless or historically conditioned. The constantly recurring ‘ahistorical’ mythic symbols and the particular society in which they occur are, therefore, simply placed side-by-side:

Anyone born into a culture is likely to imbibe a set of utopian fantasies even as he internalises certain prohibitions at an early stage. We do not know whether these utopian elements are part of a collective unconscious. The problem of conformities in the symbols of utopia is not unlike that of dream symbols. They may be ahistorical and acultural, though always found in a specific context, social and psychological (Manuel & Manuel: 13–14).

Furthermore, they regard a sociological account as necessarily providing a static picture of the structure of the society of a given utopian writer, in itself insufficient, they believe, to capture an inexpressible quality possessed by some utopias. They say, in a passage which mocks sociology, that:

To announce in tones of dramatic revelation that a utopia mirrors the misery of the working classes or the squeeze of the lesser nobility between the peasants and the royal power is to say something, but not enough [...] [L]imiting an interpretation to the immediate environment of the utopian, tying him down too closely and mechanically to the precise circumstances and incidents that could have triggered his writing, fails to recognise that he may have something ahistorical to say about love, aggression, the nature of work, the fulfilment of personality. The truly great utopian is a Janus-like creature, time-bound and free of time, place-bound and free of place. His duality should be respected and appreciated (Manuel & Manuel: 24).

And the use of psychological concepts also gets short shrift for the same reason:

An ideal visionary type, the perfect utopian, would probably both hate his father and come from a disinherited class. A bit of schizophrenia, a dose of megalomania, obsessiveness and compulsiveness fit neatly into the stereotype. But the utopian personality that is more than an item of a catalogue must also be gifted and stirred by a creative passion (Manuel & Manuel: 27).

In these passages the Manuels are forced to invoke an obscure, ineffable flair possessed by gifted utopians which makes them somehow rise above their place in the historical process and apparently enables them to say something ‘ahistorical’. This is because the authors implicitly regard, in the style of Romanticism, a social-scientific account of utopias as being unable to exhaust the spiritual autonomy and creativity of man. They want to cloak utopias with a strange and profound ancient mystery which stretches back into the mists of antiquity and pre-history. They cannot envisage that it might be possible to explain sociologically why it is that at a certain point a particular utopian solution to social problems, written by one person, is congruent with many people’s experiences and wishes at that time. And then further explain how the utopia finds fertile soil in later generations because similar social problems and experiences have recurred for reasons that can be delineated.

A dynamic sociological account does not necessarily have to reduce utopias solely to their function for particular group at a particular time, nor deny the very special talents of the individual utopian writer or artist. The Manuels are caught on the horns of a false dilemma, the solution to which drives them into the arms of mythology. Eschewing a general interdisciplinary theory, they can only point abstractly to the survival value of some utopias, rather than others, by assuming that the genesis of this phenomenon contains an obscure, recurrent level which ultimately defies explanation. Predictably, then, in their explanation they fall back on a vague term of no empirical import derived unreflectively from existentialist philosophy: the transhistorical validity of a utopia, they write, is the result of its closeness to some aspect of the ‘human condition’ as such (Manuel & Manuel: 20).

In the analysis of Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, specifically, the Manuels are aware that this work in particular has survived its context, to be interpreted and reinterpreted in many different ways in the centuries since. They mention how it has been taken up by various socialists, liberals and communists in later years who have read the work in various ways in order to inform their own purposes. But they have regarded it as far more grave, earnest, absolutist, self-righteous, apocalyptic and vehement than it actually was. The temper of the original Christian humanist utopia in More was ‘gay, playful, tolerant, sceptical, amusing in various degrees’ (Manuel & Manuel: 149). More was enthralled with Hellenic culture (which includes the myth of an ideal city on earth) and the Manuels show how Utopia artfully weaves into its structure allusions, motifs and jokes at the expense of Plato’s Republic . More’s Utopia picks up the threads of Plato’s observations about an ideal city, reproduces the dialogue form and distinguishes between discursive argument and substantial description of a utopia in a skilful way that would have been appreciated in the circle of humanists in More’s London who were familiar with Greek writers.

The Manuels describe the monologue by the Portuguese mariner Raphael Hythloday about the sorry state of Henry VIII’s England and the description of the life of Utopians, who had arrived at Christian moral and political truths even though they had never heard of the Gospels until Hythloday’s coming. This society was not an earthly paradise, but intended more as a representation of the natural desires and authentic needs of humanity. It was, like More’s London, an urban one. Like the other humanists of his time, More wants to ‘Hellenize’ the cities of England with a civic spirit, derived from the Greek polis . The book is ‘antifeudal’ (Manuel & Manuel: 134) with the Utopian social order being a patriarchal, ‘calm meritocracy’ (ibid). Warrior-nobles are the enemies, the monarch is dependent on civilian councillors and the learned are highly valued, which reflected changes going on in the royal service of many European monarchies at this time. The two authors attribute More’s un-Platonic advocacy of complete equality of property for all free inhabitants and his intricate hierarchy of pleasures, to his Christian humanism.

Indeed, central to the interpretation of More’s Utopia for the Manuels is the religious dimension. They insist that Utopia must not be stripped of its ‘religious dress’ (Manuel & Manuel: 126). It is inconceivable without ‘a belief in the immortality of the soul and in rewards and punishments in the next world’ (Manuel & Manuel: 125). In Utopia the root of evil is the lust for possessions, identified with the Christian sin of pride; the admonishments by Hythloday against hunger, crime, vast possessions, idleness and iniquity are in keeping with Christian and Hellenic censures against wealth and cupidity; and the apparently modern remarks about care for the sick and security in old age and More’s sympathies for propertyless people, stemmed not from a proto-modern concern for equality and social welfare, but from a desire to eradicate the sin of arrogance that had led to the Fall. More also draws biblical lessons from the customs and patterns of behaviour of the Utopians, for example their contempt for gold and the attitudes expressed towards pleasure, baptism and religious toleration. The Manuels devote considerable space to showing how More tries to relate and reconcile Epicurean and Greek notions of permissible gratification, and to locating by whom More was influenced in his particular synthesis of doctrines (his teacher John Colet, Erasmus and Lorenzo Valla).

In the years before the Reformation More, like other Christian humanists, was beset with doubts and conflicts about the religious, moral and political issues of the time. Hence, there is in Utopia , the Manuels maintain, little unequivocal political advocacy but rather, through the allusive and distancing medium of its form, More thrives on paradox and suggestive inversions of the values of his time. His favourite trope is to say something, then partially withdraw it, or to take a contemporary idea for social reform to its logical conclusion without totally embracing it. For example, More condemns the enclosure movement of his time through the paradox of saying that the lamb, a symbol of Christian goodness, has become a monster, driving Christian farmers off the land into thieving, to be hunted down and hanged (Manuel & Manuel: 130–36).

In contrast, Elias’s sociological sketch (Elias 1981) of the general problem of the function of utopias in societies and of Thomas More’s Utopia in particular, is informed by his theory of civilising processes (2012 [1939]) in which the sociological and social-psychological levels – at best an adjunct for the Manuels – are brought together. Elias says that utopias are ‘directional fantasy-images of possible futures’, indispensable as a means of orientation in human societies. The image shows either what kind of solutions to social problems or type of society its authors desire should come about ( wish images ) or what solutions or futures they fear ( fear images ); and they form part of the orientation and planning of a number of groups, not just communists and socialists, those most frequently associated with utopias. (I will take up later the role of utopias in the Marxist strand of communist and socialist thinking.) By looking at the function of utopias in society as an object of sociological inquiry, Elias hopes to free the concept of utopia from either of its derogatory or laudatory associations, as well as from its associations with political groups.

Elias maintains that for the sharp edge of the concept of utopia to be maintained one has to locate the stage of development of human societies at which the term gained its customary associations. It was a stage at which the secularisation of human beliefs had gone a fair way so that people’s fantasy-images could be directed more towards social conditions. This stage corresponds to one at which people were able to judge their own communal experiences in comparison with those of other groups and were beginning to be able to develop more synthetic, less ‘naively we-centred’ (Elias 1981: 6) concepts, including that of utopia. This stage of development corresponds also to the stage at which the term state appears in European vocabulary, first in Italy. It was the stage of the rise of the firmly centralised form of rule of the absolutist form of states in Europe, to which correspond the increasing power chances of non-feudal princes, whose early representatives were Francis I, the Borgias and Henry VIII. Both the career of the term state and that of utopia remain incomprehensible, Elias says, without reference to these developments of states and to the experiences people had which were connected with them.

According to Elias, it was at this stage that Thomas More stood, secretly opposed to the rising arbitrary power of princes and risking his life to stand against it. (The Manuels refer to this period as the first of their ‘utopian constellations’, as against Elias’s stage in the process of state formation.) Hand-in-hand with the increasing stringency of secular rule went the weakening of religious rule and its corresponding (religious) orientation. The increasingly powerful rulers of states splintered the monopolistic religious organisation into competing organisations, with rulers of states increasingly trying to force their subjects into membership of one of them.

Thomas More, like other learned men of his time, had misgivings about the growing power of the absolutist princes and about the growing fanaticism of the conflicts between the religious organisations. Like other humanists caught up at this stage of these developments, More was opposed to the fanaticism of his co-religionists as well as that of the other non-conforming sectarians. Of course, as we have seen, the Manuels also see More’s Utopia as having, centrally, a religious dimension, but they concentrate (as historians of ideas) on More’s attempt to reconcile and synthesise various doctrines (Christian and Hellenic) in the book, during a period of doubt and religious conflict in the period prior to the Reformation. Whilst Elias’s stress would be on keeping in the centre of one’s explanation for aspects of the book such as that attempt to synthesise doctrines, the stage of simultaneous processes of increasing central-secular/weakening religious-monopoly rule, at which More stood. This both provided him with a specific society to criticise and enabled him to develop a concept of utopia which presupposed a more detached, less we-centred level of cognitive synthesis, directed more towards social conditions.

Elias also examines More’s Utopia as a piece of ‘literature’, that is he shows how More uses his artistic skill to provide a structure for the book which dramatises the points he is making and which enables him obliquely to make radical and forceful social criticism. He uses the then fashionable and respected dialogue form to make social criticism through the mouth of the world-traveller in order to protect himself. In this way More can make guarded attacks against the monarch or broach subjects which could easily offend the two ruling establishments of the time – the church and the state. Elias maintains that the two parts of the book – one a statement of social ills in England and the other concerned with the society of Utopia – interlock, since one illuminates the other to produce social criticism in a dramatic way. The ‘form’ was a literary one traditionally available to More, but it crucially affects what is actually communicated – the ‘content’. The Manuels, too, like many others, realise that Utopia is a work of veiled social and religious comment, though they believe it lacks the obvious advocacy of any particular party or cause. Their stress, however, is less on the structured social tensions and conflicts of the time in which More was immersed at the highest level, and the relationship of this to the ‘form’ and message of work, but more on the interweaving of Christian and Hellenic themes, motifs and allusions and the use of inversions in the book itself.

However, I do not think that these two emphases cannot be brought together. For Elias, More presents a wish-image of a utopian society in which the contemporary exploiters, represented as nobles, goldsmiths and usurers, have disappeared and More also tells of the ruthlessness of the land-owners who are enclosing peasant lands and transforming them into sheep pastures. Elias translates More’s nobles, goldsmiths and usurers into the characteristic social groups of that particular stage of development: courtiers and land-owners, moneylenders and pawnbrokers, all of whom exploit the poor. Unmentioned by Elias here are more possible biblical associations in the terms used by More, which ties in with the paradox, located by the Manuels, of the lamb, the Christian symbol of goodness, driving Christian farmers off the land into crime. The point is that these kinds of observations can be employed further to strengthen a sociological account of More at the centre of a developing tension-field of social and religious conflict in his society. But those textual, theological associations and allusions (like the correspondences with Plato’s Republic ) are of limited cognitive value considered completely in isolation from those social developments. They are, of course, also of limited value if they are brought to the fore in analysis with the ‘social structure’ left statically and loosely formulated as a less important or even secondary ‘backdrop’ or ‘background’.

(b) Sociology and utopia

From the previous section emerged the promise of a sociological theory of the origins and function of utopias in human societies and its fertility was briefly shown in explaining the significance of a particular empirical example, that of Thomas More. It was an explanation which at the same time retained the recognition of the special talent of the author as a real, living person caught up in the tension field of his society. Despite this promise, few sociologists, it seems to me, since Karl Mannheim wrote his Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1929) have produced a theory of utopias which has advanced his contribution very much. [4]

Occasionally one finds on closer inspection that a writer one always thought of as having a lot to say about the social function of utopias is actually using the idea of a utopia for another purpose altogether. Ralf Dahrendorf, for example, in his well-known essay ‘Out of Utopia’ (in Dahrendorf 1959) says, quite rightly, that utopias are usually portrayed as suspended out of time and/or spatially isolated, with their inhabitants living perfect, agreeable lives in complete consensus. But his target is, in fact, the then dominant sociological theory of the ‘social system’ by Talcott Parsons which, Dahrendorf says, sees human societies as conflictless and consensual, i.e. like a utopia. I cannot undertake a comprehensive survey of all the works on utopias by social scientists, but only indicate a few trends and important exemplars in what is a highly heterogeneous literature.

Much of what passes as the sociology of utopias is also often, on close scrutiny, social philosophising, political speculation or a moral indictment of utopianism because of its putative deleterious social and political consequences. For example, Dumont (1974) speculates about the plight of humanity on a global scale and how a catastrophe can be avoided arising from the irrational distribution of resources between nation-states. His conclusion is summarised in the title of his book, Utopia or Else . Melvin J. Lasky’s Utopia and Revolution (Lasky 1977) is a historical account of the tragic consequences of revolutionaries’ utopian commitments to total change and social reconstruction.

Not all the speculators see purely negative consequences of utopias, however; often the presence of utopias in societies is seen as also performing a creative, critical function. For example, Chad Walsh, in his often-quoted From Utopia to Nightmare says that the traditional articles of faith underpinning all utopian thinking are that man is good and perfectible and can live in harmony ruled by rulers who will not be corrupted by power (Walsh 1962: 70). But the ‘dystopian counter-attack’ (ibid) has been there from the beginning, and re-surfaced in the 20 th century to produce anti-socialist reactions and dire warnings, fuelled by Stalinism, about utopian experiments. A recurrent theme of dystopias such as Eugene Zamiatin’s We or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is that one of the few ways in which programmed and brainwashed individuals can break out of their subordination is to fall in love, something which runs counter to the usual array of methods employed to dampen discontent and creativity (Walsh 1962: 149). Walsh concludes, however, that in the historical utopia/dystopia dialectic the ‘utopian is like the artist, the dystopian is the art critic’ (Walsh 1962: 177).

This theme occurs a great deal in the para-sociological, speculative literature on utopias – the idea of the utopian as critic, as the indispensable builder of dreams prior to the arrival of the dystopian who does the secondary job of putting them perspective. The utopian is no realist, but always one with possible worlds in mind. This idea is expressed by Armytage (1968) as the recurrence in our present stage ‘after utopia’ of the generative power of the utopians’ concern for the future, which ‘prevents experience relapsing into mere existential responses’ (Armytage 1968: 214); and by Kolakowski (1971b: from 31) as the creative interplay of the ‘priest’ and the ‘jester’. Or again, as Martin G. Plattel puts it: ‘The essence of the utopia consists in the liberating impetus to transcend the limitations of human existence in the direction of a better future. The utopia fulfils a critical function’ (Plattel 1972: 44). (I will return to this point later when discussing the Marxists, for whom this basic idea forms a central component in their theory of the function and possible realisation of utopias.)

  In futurology, the statistically sophisticated social sciences in particular figure prominently in the production of extrapolated ‘scientific’ utopias. For example, the report for the American president called Global 2000 or the deliberations of the American Academy’s Commission on the Year 2000. The latter discussions provide, through the extrapolation of social trends and through statistical projections (Kahn and Wiener 1967: 705ff) or by ‘technological forecasting’ (Schon 1967: 759ff), a predicted picture, on certain assumptions, of the future pattern of life in the advanced societies. Daniel Bell (1967: 667) calls these patterns ‘hypothetical futures’ and, together with his collaborators, ventures quite specific predictions for the year 2000, such as people landing on Mars, undersea colonies, regional weather control and many more (Kahn and Wiener 1967: 711ff). There are many methodological problems involved in these kinds of individual technological predictions and about extrapolating trends in general. The authors have to make a number of assumptions about social relations continuing to reproduce themselves in certain repeated ways in order to produce in the future the statistical trends extrapolated from the present. [5]

Aside from those issues, the function of this work is clear: it provides planners and powerful government élites with scientific utopias upon which they can base present national and international economic, political and strategic policies. These studies are often seen as peddling ‘black utopias’ or as Orwellian visions of inevitably totalitarian, polluted, overcrowded societies, replete with complex surveillance techniques, etc. It must be noted, however, that the forum discussions between Daniel Bell, Fred Ilké, Herman Kahn and Zbigniew Brzezinski (Bell 1967: 666ff) on these issues were marked by a high degree of caution about outcomes, a concern for values and some optimism in the possibilities of this kind of predictive knowledge being used to stave off trends and to alert people and governments to the ‘black’ possibilities. Bell writes of various economic and technological extrapolations and of his own image of the structure of the ‘post industrial society’:

It may well be that the actual future, the year 2000, will in no way look the way we are hypothetically assuming it will. But then we would have a means of ascertaining what intervened to create a decisive change (Bell 1967: 667).

An interesting recent sociological theory of the role of utopias in societies has been put forward by Ruth Levitas (1979). For my purposes in this brief survey her theory is worth discussing in detail because in reaching her conclusions she carries out a critique of both Karl Mannheim and of Zygmunt Bauman’s influential recent study (Bauman 1975) about the catalytic role of utopias in advanced societies. Her article has, therefore, a useful synoptic character. (I will return to Bauman’s work in the next section.) Levitas argues that ‘the content, form, location and social role of utopia vary with the material conditions in which people live’ (Levitas 1979: 19). These historical variations have been obscured by recent writers defining utopia by its function in catalysing social change in modern times She also wants to refute the suggestion that there are no utopias in modern societies.

Levitas is rightly not satisfied with Mannheim’s philosophical definition of utopia in terms of its function. He said that utopias are those ideas which are incongruous with and transcendent of reality and oriented towards changing society, whereas ideologies, though also transcendent, are oriented towards maintaining it. This definition, says Levitas, is abstract and one which obscures changes of function. Mannheim said that the criterion of whether beliefs are utopias or ideologies is whether they tend to change or preserve the existing order. The truly utopian idea is the one which realises itself, thus ‘proving’ itself correct and hence ceasing to be utopian. Levitas finds this criterion of ‘success’ inadequate because (i) it is impossible to tell what is a utopia empirically before practical activity proves one ‘right’; (ii) the researcher needs to be able to assess with some certainty the social causes leading to one rather than another utopian idea ‘shattering reality’ (Mannheim); and (iii) most importantly, that Mannheim contradicted himself by assuming a fixed, determined outcome to history which ultimately realised only one utopian idea, that of the rising class, which carried an impending truth. This was an assumption which limited utopias to the one emerging dominant reality, but which would then in that event hardly be utopian at all. Without this (undesirable) determinism, Mannheim’s definition of utopia is, Levitas claims, unhelpful because there is no way in which one utopia or Sorelian ‘myth’ can be regarded as more ‘correct’ than another (Levitas 1979: 21). [6]

Shifting the emphasis from the success criterion to the purpose utopias serve in society, as Bauman has done, Levitas sees as more satisfactory. He says that utopias today have four functions: to relativise the present; to relativise the future (exploring alternative outcomes of the present); to portray the future as a set of competing projects and to be committed to one of these; and to influence historical events. But the problems with this conceptualisation are that Bauman wrongly says that utopias are a modern phenomenon and only have importance after the advent of modernity, thus excluding pre-modern commonwealths, myths, earthly paradises and so on. It also precludes investigating utopias in different variations in different social conditions. Levitas wants to bring to the centre of analysis the fact that English utopias have undergone significant transformation over time, the explanation for which must be related to the ‘real conditions confronting people different times’ (Levitas 1979: 23), something which also must be looked at to explain the apparent dearth of utopias today.

In the case of Britain, Levitas says that the medieval poem ‘The Land of Cokaygne’ portrays a land of abundance which is a ‘wish-fantasy’ (Levitas 1979: 24), an earthly paradise, a dream set against reality, but it is not a utopia which is to be brought about by human agency: it is not a blue-print for political action. It is fictionally located in space . For a utopia to be realisable or to catalyse change, however, on the model of Bauman’s analysis, one has to presuppose a different conception of time prevailing in a society. Drawing on the work of Polak (1973) argues that in medieval times society-in-time was conceived of as static and transformable only by divine intervention. The scope for temporally located utopias to be created by man was therefore limited. From the seventeenth century onwards, utopias are temporally rather than spatially located and the emergence of the idea of progress in the nineteenth century (resulting from a speeding up of the pace of change discernible within the individual life-span and the development of sciences of nature, which suggested that society too, by extension, was also malleable and amenable to human control) an evolutionary view of society-in-time became possible. This made it possible to envisage two kinds of utopia, related to a linear view of time:

Linear descent would give rise to a different kind of utopia from linear ascent (progress) which places utopia in the future; utopia would be likely to be placed in the past, would not catalyse change, and extrapolations from the present would be anti-utopias, reflecting the fears rather than the desires, of the present (Levitas 1979: 26).

Levitas sees Thomas More’s Utopia as marking a transition between the Cokaygne utopia as a wish-fulfilment and escape and the nineteenth century idea, expressed particularly by socialists, of utopia as an inspiration and catalyst for change. More’s utopia was social criticism implying a utopia in space (partly inspired by the voyages of discovery of his time) but, although More had an idea of an alternative society clearly in mind, he did not face the practical problem of realising it (Levitas 1979: 27).

In the contemporary period, Levitas continues, we have witnessed the decline of the nineteenth century evolutionary utopia following the Soviet socialist experiment, which has tied the socialist concept of utopia closely to existing social conditions. But Levitas rejects the idea that utopias have declined in modern times only because of the reality-shock of Soviet communism. There are still pastoral utopias, which are anti-industrialism. Moreover, the prevailing despondency in advanced societies about the decline of societies towards disaster, coupled with a decline in the optimistic belief in an evolutionary transition to utopia, has led to a transition to utopia now being conceived of as resulting from a radical break with the existing order or as located in the past. Levitas regards this shift as not being away from evolutionary thinking itself, but as a shift in modern times from confidence in the possibility of human control over social processes producing a pervading fatalism. Under these conditions utopias cannot catalyse change but only compensate people for their social deprivations, because the conviction that things can get better has been eroded by modern events and social processes. It is these conditions that determine the kind of utopias prevalent in modern society, as they did in the past. Hence, there has not been a failure and disappearance of the utopian vision, but a change in the nature of the vision: ‘The problem is not lack of utopias, but lack of hope; and the cause of this lies not in imagination but in the real conditions of the present’ (Levitas 1979: 31). Utopia thus reverts to its earlier role as ‘wish-fantasy’.

Suggestive and interesting though this interpretation is, there are a few brief critical points I can make. (a) Levitas does not consider that the conceptualisation proposed by Bauman above, which she hails as an advance over Mannheim’s philosophical definition, is just as abstract and philosophical. What does it mean, concretely, to say that utopias ‘relativise the present’ or ‘relativise the future’? This picture of utopia as the ‘counter-culture of capitalism’ (Bauman) simply reproduces the abstract philosophical view of the para-sociological speculators quoted earlier, i.e. that utopias are a critical, future-oriented transcendence of contemporary social conditions. (b) Levitas mentions an important shift in the development of utopias in British history associated with transformations in the conception of society-in-time which is, rightly, of some importance. But, aside from a loosely Marxist appeal to the ‘material conditions’ of people as explaining those shifts, she does not put forwards a general theory of social development to account for them. (c) Probably because of a latent Marxism, she fails to note that wish-images are also present in the modern socialist utopia, as they are in all utopias which describe desirable societies. This so whether its proponents are wanting to realise them (as in socialism) or not (as in the case of ‘Cokaygne’). Though she rightly connects ‘anti-utopias’ with fear-images. (d) In order to avoid the philosophical abstraction mentioned earlier, Levitas needs to consider the problem that some utopias (particularly if one sees them on Elias’s model as indispensable ‘directional fantasy-images’ of possible futures) are, at any stage, potentially more realisable than others. In order empirically to ascertain this, a more developed and explicit theory of social development is needed than the vague reference to ‘material conditions’ that she puts forward.

(c) The Marxian utopia: from history to logic

The conception of utopia in the Marxist strand of socialist and communist thinking bears the marks of its genesis in the early part of the nineteenth century. Many of the features of modern utopias identified by Ruth Levitas and of utopias in general by Norbert Elias, discussed in the previous sections, are to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels. Their vision of a classless society of planned and socialised production, in which the political authority of the State had ‘withered away’ (Engels) was temporally located. It also presupposed, like many other theories of society of the time, the idea of progress and an evolutionary view of society-in-time. Indeed, Marx said that the developmental sequence of modes of production he claimed to have discovered in the history of mankind (Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois) are ‘ progressive epochs in the economic formation of society’ (Marx 1859: 182 my emphasis).

Furthermore, Marx’s theory also presupposed a stage of social development at which the secularisation of people’s beliefs had developed to a far-reaching point at which they were able not only to address social conditions as Thomas More had done, but also enthusiastically and optimistically to visualise society as more-or-less totally amenable to planned, rational, human, as opposed to divine, control. Hence, in Marx and Engels the problem of utopia becomes centrally the political problem of its practical realisation , informed by a social-scientific theory of social development.

As is well-known, Marx and Engels opposed their ‘scientific’ socialism to the abstract, ideal societies of the ‘utopian’ socialists which, they argued, were constructed solely from their imaginations and then imposed on to society. As Engels wrote:

The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempt to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies (Engels 1880: 398).

It is interesting that in this passage Engels identified the utopian socialists’ depiction of a perfect social order, which had eliminated social problems, with ‘phantasy’, of which his own theory, by implication, was devoid. (Though in the pamphlet he agrees that Fourier, Saint-Simon and others nonetheless often analysed and criticised society in highly comprehensive, penetrating and masterly ways.)

However, as Goodwin (1978) has shown in her study of Robert Owen, William Godwin, Charles Fourier, and Henri Saint-Simon, a central theme in all their works was a scientific analysis of human nature, from which they hoped to deduce appropriate consequences for social organisation. They presented ‘radically environmentalist accounts of human psychology’ (Goodwin 1978: 202) from which they concluded that human nature was plastic, perfectible and rational, utopia for them being synonymous with social harmony – a conflict-free society. Goodwin believes, however, that ‘no given human nature logically entails a particular form of society as the utopians hoped’ (ibid: 195); their work was disguised social prescription; and most of the utopias fail ‘every major test of scientificity’ (ibid: 196). Despite these drawbacks, Goodwin concludes, like so many other writers in this field, as we saw in the last section, that ‘these utopias deserve credit for their transcendence of the given reality’ (ibid: 203) and ‘the articulation of social alternatives is the greatest service which the utopian can perform’ (ibid: 204).

To return to Marx and Engels, they were apparently claiming a different kind of scientific status for their kind of socialism. For obvious polemical reasons, Engels plays down the scientific aspirations of the utopian socialists by saying, for example, that Fourier’s fine phrases and appeals to Reason and perfectibility were a way of confronting the social conditions of bourgeois society with ‘the rose-coloured phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of the time’ (Engels 1880: 400). Writers such as Fourier were only able to produce such ‘crude’ (ibid) analyses of the social ills of their time because the economic conditions which would enable them to be solved were only at an embryonic stage of development at that time. A truly scientific socialism, however, is the theoretical expression of the developmental tendencies in real economic conditions of society which, by their own internal dynamic, are laying down the more mature conditions whereby it will be possible to realise those abstract utopias in practice. Briefly, these processes are expressed as the incapacity of the bourgeoisie further to manage the socialised productive forces they have unleashed, but which they privately appropriate. The solution of this contradiction lies in the working class, through a revolutionary act, giving the socialised character which the means of production have spontaneously developed under capitalism a truly public character, which abolishes the domination of products over producers characteristic of capitalism. The free utopian society talked about by the utopians is then realised, by a combination of maturing economic tendencies and the coincident revolutionary action of the ‘proletariat’. Engels writes:

The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialised means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialised character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialised production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the state dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master – free (Engels 1880: 428).

I cannot advance the familiar criticisms (teleology, economic determinism, mythology, etc.) of this familiar and somewhat discredited theory of history. My purpose is only to establish what made the socialism of Marx and Engels unique amidst the plethora of socialist, anarchist and communist utopias in the early part of the nineteenth century in Europe, which provided the basis of the theoretical platform of Marxism. Marx alone claimed that what other people merely thought was desirable (the mitigation or ending of social conflicts, social ills, economic distress, etc.) and for which they morally indicted or criticised society, or which they projected into rationalistic models of utopian socialist societies, he could demonstrate, social-scientifically , was built into the antagonistic tendencies of capitalism anyway. (And, more generally, into the entire historical development of mankind itself.) The utopian solutions to social problems and social ills that other people merely wished or dreamed would come about, he said he could demonstrate empirically, through the science of political economy, were necessarily written into the historical, economic development of societies. Marx yoked together the twin passions of radical intellectuals caught up in the rapid and profound social changes taking place in post-Enlightenment Europe: science as the liberation of humanity from superstition and communism as the hope for the end of social inequality and the complete inauguration of freedom and justice.

As I have pointed out elsewhere (Kilminster 1979: chapters 2 and 18) this impossible balancing act was not without serious problems, which dogged later practitioners of Marx’s ideas in their ideologically frozen form as Marxist doctrine. On the one hand, the logic of his secular theory of development suggested a realistic picture of an endless series of further social stages moving into the future as societies intergenerationally continued to reproduce themselves. Marx and Engels’s argument against the utopian socialists is essentially that you cannot realistically postulate a perfect utopian society in the abstract when its realisation in practice depends on the maturation of specific socio-economic conditions. In Marx’s words: ‘Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve’ (Marx 1959: 182). That is to say, those tasks will be solved when, in Marx’s terms, economic conditions which would enable their solution exist or are in the course of formation. There is no reason to suppose, on this argument, however, that tasks and problems will not perennially continue to arise as human social development proceeds. But, on the other hand, this model stands unreconciled with the utopian promise which is also present in the theory, and without which it would surely lose its uniqueness and appeal, that communism is the rational, uncontradictory, conflictless end-state to the ‘pre-history’ (ibid) of mankind, towards which the historical process can be scientifically shown to have been preparing us.

Few Marxists today, however, in the light of the re-emergence of oppression in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, where the means of production have been largely made public in the hands of the state, now take seriously Marx’s optimistic idea that such changes will inevitably bring about a classless and stateless society. The experiences of putting Marx’s theory into practice in those countries only revealed the in adequacies of the theory. Ralf Dahrendorf has shown how Marx swings backwards and forwards between sociology and philosophy on the question of the social consequences of abolishing private property, by tricks of definition which are unconsciously designed to maintain the integrity of his ‘system’. Dahrendorf writes:

[I]f private property disappears (empirical hypothesis), then there are no longer classes (trick of definition)! If there are no longer any classes, there is no alienation (speculative postulate). The realm of liberty is realised on earth (philosophical idea). Had Marx, conversely, defined private property by authority relations, his empirical observations would not have ‘fitted’, and he would have had to drop his philosophy of history. For effective private property may disappear empirically, but authority relations can do so only the magic trick of the system maniac (1959: 30–31).

Furthermore, on the level of theoretical developments, the concept of the ‘historical necessity’ of socialism (upon which the scientificity of Marx’s theory of history ultimately rested) has been undermined this century by a number of writers. Particularly influential was Max Weber’s decisive argument that the notion of historical necessity was a theological hangover in Marxist theory which endued history with an overall meaning after modern societies had become depleted of inherent religiosity by the ‘process of disenchantment’ of the world (Weber, 1918: 139; see also Löwith 1932).

The result of the interplay between those social and theoretical developments has been a shift in the character of the utopian level in Marxist theory. In Marx and in the more deterministic versions of the theory, it is regarded as referring to a kind of society which will be the necessary outcome of historical, economic tendencies in European societies and of capitalism in particular, as the apogee of that development. The trend, however, in some recent Marxist writings of the Critical Theory school (Habermas, Apel) and the Eastern European ‘Marxist humanism’ (Bauman) has been to regard the utopian, rational society of equality and freedom postulated by the socialist utopians and the classical Marxists, merely as a potentiality, a possibility, an idealised state of affairs, as yet unrealised. This state is tenuously grounded in the present stage of society, not as its more-or-less inevitable outcome, but as a partly realised idealised state which is, moreover, in its entirety, inherently un realisable.

In the following pages I will show how that theoretical outcome was already programmed into the inertia of the Marxist tradition itself, its structure and assumptions, and in particular results from its philosophical residues. Although the later writers were responding to, and were caught up in, social processes and events of modern times (such as Stalinism, the decline of working class radicalism, fascism and the events of 1968) they carried with them, as conceptual baggage, that relatively autonomous Marxist theory, which they then brought to bear on those events. I will attempt to place Marx’s theory, which they inherited, further back into its more far-reaching, remote, longer-term structural and historical presuppositions. This will reveal fundamental, but historically produced, patterns of thinking present in the theory which shape in advance the way in which society is grasped and, hence, poses the problem of the realisation of utopias and the parameters of its solution in characteristic ways. I hope this exercise will have the additional virtue of perhaps shedding light on the consequences of putting Marx’s theories into practice.

My interpretation hinges on how Marx tries, through the category of practice , to unite in his social science the epistemological and ethical dimensions of the traditional philosophy he inherited. Marx’s attempt to resolve questions of ethics by reference to practice is of some importance for understanding Marxist discussions of the realisation of utopias. As Goodwin remarks, ‘Utopias are necessarily based on a concept of the Good Life ... they focus not on the individual moral being, but on that more complex creature, man-in-society, and seek to improve both elements of this compound’ (1978: 4). However, since Marx links the kind of utopia possible with the level of economic development, then he was understandably impatient with abstract moralising about the present state of society in the light of an ahistorical model of the perfect social conditions fitting for man. As we shall see, the problem is, though that Marx’s practical resolution of the ethical issue in a society which no longer in practice requires ethics, lends itself to later bureaucratic social élites legitimating their power by claiming that their society is the socialistic fusion of Is and Ought which Marx said would be possible once the means of production had passed into public hands.

  From the point of view of epistemology, I think the significance of Marx’s use of the category of practice is as follows (drawing on Kilminster 1979 and 1982). At the historical stage at which he stood, Marx inherited the philosophical vocabulary of traditional European epistemology, mediated to via the legacy of Kant and Hegel. Following in the wake of Newtonian science, traditional epistemology had a particular cast in which, polarised into rationalists and empiricists, philosophers from Descartes onwards debated the foundations of knowledge in terms of the two sides of cognition: the individual mind and what it experiences. Debates thus circulated around the issues of how the mind comes to know what it does and what it and the ‘external’, mechanical world, known to humans through the senses, respectively play in the creation of ideas. Some of the characteristic epistemological dualisms of the tradition include subject/object, thought/reality, reason/experience, intellect/senses, ideal/real and consciousness/being. For Marx, the various positions taken in these debates are epitomised by the polar doctrines of idealism and materialism. Kant and Hegel had both insisted, in different ways, that human consciousness was active in shaping its perception of the world. In the Theses on Feuerbach (Marx 1845a) Marx mentions that idealists had stressed this side but says that idealism was, however, out of touch with real, sensuous reality. Materialism, on the other hand, stressed that experience was the final arbiter of knowledge and materiality the fundamental stratum of reality. This meant that materialism gave force to the real sensuous world, although materialists tended to regard the mind as passive in the process of cognition.

Utilising the category of practice, meaning mundane, human, practical, social activity, Marx argues against materialism in an idealist fashion and against idealism in a materialist fashion, their unity constituted practically. [7] For Marx, there is no point in reducing cognition to either of its material and ideal poles because both sides are, and always have been, in an active relation in human practical activity. Objective reality is ineradicably subjectively constituted through practice, since conscious, labouring mankind is part of nature. Hence, nature inevitably has a socially imprinted character and an autonomous role in human affairs at the same time. Human beings only encounter, and hence know, the world through their active contact with it. As Kolakowski put it, for Marx, ‘Active contact with the resistance of nature creates knowing man and nature as his object at one and the same time’ (1971a: 75).

So much for Marx’s epistemology: but those ruminations by Marx in the traditional categories of idealism and materialism were not just intended to be about questions of human knowledge. The whole point of Marx’s discussions of materialism and idealism was that various positions defined within that polarity carried with them, by their very nature , practical, political implications. The idea that consciousness was cognitively active in real, practical, productive activity, suggested that people could actively move to change the world that their active, practical cognition constituted. This was something which a passive materialist theory could not theorise. Indeed, Marx said, adherence to such a one-sided theory actually justified a kind of political practice by its systematic epistemological exclusions. For example, the kind of materialist theory which stated that ideas were simply a reflection of the circumstances and environment surrounding people, implied politically that if one changed people’s environment then they would correspondingly be changed as well. Such a view lent itself to élitist forms of utopian socialism of the kind mentioned by Engels which I quoted earlier. Similarly, Marx links the inherent epistemological individualism of some forms of materialism with the individualism of bourgeois liberalism: ‘The highest point attained by that materialism which only observes the world [...] is the observation of particular individuals and of civil society’ (Marx 1845a: 30). (I will mention later how Marx integrates conservatism into his framework.)

In the 1840s when Marx was most concerned to develop a unified theory of society and history which would inform politics, Left Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer were rabidly anti-liberal through critique . This Hegelian procedure entailed the critical comparison of some aspect of society with its ideal, or perfect potentiality. They would critically compare, for example, a given particular set of judicial institutions with the pure, universal category of Justice, of which the institutions were held to be only an imperfect embodiment; or, say, a particular constitution with the universal idea of Democracy. Marx sees this procedure as ineffective verbal radicalism and enjoins instead ‘practical-critical activity’ (Marx 1845b: 28). That is action which was not just a comparison – on the plane of ethics – of an aspect of social reality with what it ideally could be, or ought to be, but rather real activity which tried to make reality accord with what it ought to be, in practice . In this situation, the ought-questions raised by philosophy would be transcended (abolished) in practice. This is, I think, the force of Marx’s dictum, ‘You cannot transcend philosophy without realising it [...] [and you cannot] realise philosophy without transcending it’ (McLellan 1971: 121–122, paraphrased). He is, in effect, talking about creating a society which no longer requires ethics.

In a word, Marx tries to unite epistemology and ethics by putting together positions defined within the traditional epistemological doctrines of idealism and materialism with the great ideologies of the nineteenth century – liberalism, conservatism and socialism. The result is a more comprehensive synthesis, epistemologically and ethically, the practical, political implications of which refer not to bourgeois society but to the whole of humanity: ‘the standpoint of the new materialism is human society or social humanity’ (Marx 1845a: 30). In Marx’s language, mankind makes its own world, which it constitutes by its practical activity, which therefore means that it can potentially consciously change it various ways. Under the conditions of social class fettered alienation, however, this constituting process has become lost to consciousness, exacerbated by social life under advanced stages of the division and alienation, of labour. The point is that for Marx questions of knowledge and questions of ethics are to be fed into a scientifically informed politics on behalf of the current exploited class, the proletariat. The political task is to hasten the historical process towards the idealised state of socialism, which is in any case already built into its tendency. What others think merely ought to be (a socialist utopia) is actually embodied in what is , as its telos , as Hegel taught. It reaches real, historical maturity whether people have ideas about it or not:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things (Marx & Engels 1845: 48).

Another way of putting these matters which will bring out the issues from a different angle, is to see Marx’s project, following Rotenstreich (1977) as seeking in practical politics the unity of the philosophical realms of theoretical and practical reason. In attempting to reconcile the ‘starry heavens above me and moral law with me’, Kant had separated nature and practical reason (ethics) or, more broadly, science and morality. Both theoretical and practical reason were spontaneous aspects of Reason, the former the domain of categories which limited knowledge and the latter the domain of ethical imperatives, a practical sphere separate and alongside the reality of nature. Hegel, however, claimed, against Kant, that the world is knowable because it is inherently rational. Reason, for Hegel, has complete spontaneity on the intellectual plane as Kant had said, but this only made reality knowable because the object was the objective embodiment of Reason anyway. The embodiment of Reason in the world meant that it could be demonstrated that history was its gradual teleological unfolding, in various spheres, as determinations of the Idea. But it also meant that practical reason (ethics) could not be consistently maintained as constituting a separate sphere on the Kantian model because, like Reason in general, it must also be embodied in the world as well. So, for Hegel, there was no need to pledge the actualisation of Reason in practical life by the creation of a separate Kantian ethical sphere: the level of speculation, or the unity of Reason in his system assured their unity.

For Marx, the Young Hegelians who embraced this position could only put to real people in real societies the ‘moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical [...] consciousnesss’ (Marx & Engels 1845: 30). In other words, there was no passage, on the Hegelian view, from the achieved level of speculation to the practical realisation of the unity of Reason in the world. For Marx, the Young Hegelians were ‘the staunchest conservatives’ (ibid). In Marx, on the other hand, history is the arena for the practical realisation of Reason. This translates into the proposition (expressed by Marx as the development of the forces of production outstripping their necessary relations of production) that in practice people must realise the inherent rational potentiality for social organisation, development and progress spontaneously bequeathed to the bourgeois epoch by history. It is this potential (the utopia) which is fettered by archaic social class relations, necessitating revolutionary change. In my view, Marx’s whole theory of history as a series of progressive socio-economic formations is predicated on the assumption that they have been mediated by their necessary telos of socialism as the end of the alienated ‘pre-history’ of mankind. Indeed, Marx specifically describes the Hegelian theory of history as a ‘metaphysically travestied’ (Marx 1845b) version of what is a real, scientifically describable, historical process. The forces and relations of production dialectic in Marx parallels Hegel’s categorical unity of content and form, whereby it is the developing content (forces of production) which determines changes of form (relations of production) towards the self-development of the Idea (socialism). Once Marx has translated the Hegelian conception of history as the embodiment and realisation of Reason into the terms of a socio-economic theory of development, then the theory articulating the process and a moral indictment of society were, for him, necessarily the same thing.

I will now draw together from that brief survey of Marx’s dialogue with the philosophy and politics of his time some important components of his theory which were crucially formed in those historically specific encounters. With hindsight we can see that these elements are no longer serviceable, but they have nonetheless continued to shape the ways in which later Marxists have tried to grasp social dynamics and posed the problem of realising the socialist utopia in the changed conditions of the twentieth century.

(a) Marx’s social science was burdened with the philosophical tradition which he was trying to overcome, since he still refers to his theory of society by the term ‘materialism’ and his base and superstructure model of society reproduces the being/consciousness polarity of traditional metaphysics in spite of his efforts to overcome the dualism through the category of practice. This characteristic has thus structured later inquiries into complex and sophisticated adaptations of the model which try to determine the reciprocal effectivity of ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ factors, ‘material’ having been identified by Marx with economic activity. This feature has also focussed attention overwhelmingly on to productive relations. These theoretical moves, however, still reproduce the basically dualistic structure of the theory and thus remain trapped within its fundamental antinomy. Marx’s historically specific synthesis of traditional epistemology and politics established for future generations in the tradition the erroneous idea that philosophical positions about the nature of ideas in terms of sense perception were somehow significantly related to political ideologies.

(b) Marx was only able to incorporate ethics into his theory by paying the price of teleology. It was only later, in the 1920s, that the discrediting in theory of the Marxist notion that history was meaningful and rational in its tendency towards what society ‘ought’ to be, which partly gave rise to the problem for Marxists of how to re -incorporate (without ethical relativism or a return to Kantian ethics associated with reformist social democracy) this ethical level into a social science denuded of the notion of historical necessity. In non-Marxist forms of social enquiry today it is common to find a pre-Hegelian logical separation of matters of fact from questions of value, of Is and Ought, science and morality and factual and normative questions, enshrined in the different disciplines of sociology and social philosophy. These separations are not only regarded as logically or methodologically sound, but also as providing a bulwark against the abuse of the supposed Marxian fusion of Is and Ought by bureaucratic socialist élites who have justified directive and totalitarian practices by claiming that their policies are based on a correct scientific analysis of historical economic development and are thus also, by definition, morally right.

(c) The image of man built into Marx’s theory was, on the whole, a rationalistic one, shaped by the philosophy he was grappling with. Human beings should be self-determining, self-conscious and freed from the constraints of social alienation. In Marx’s early writings in particular it is an image of people as mainly knowing, choosing and acting, but not also as affective, constrained and interdependent (though the latter theme does occur, interpreted purely economically, in Marx’s later writings, in particular in the Grundrisse ). Later Marxists, however, have striven to realise the one-sided rational, utopian model of man in practice, or it is an image which has implicitly guided their enquiries and politics. They have generally, therefore, failed to notice that social life would be impossible without some social constraints in the broadest sense. Even though he sought to link what one must call today relative emancipation from social constraints, with the level of social development of society (in which he considered the economy to be central) in order to avoid abstract utopianising, the utopian level in Marx’s theory still implied that he had in mind a harmonious society because he believed he had correctly predicted the demise of the conditions which produced social conflict. Elias’s comment on the flaws of the rationalistic utopia of Thomas More could well apply to Marx:

The ideal state seemed to work like a well-oiled piece of machinery. On the shoulders of all citizens was placed the heavy burden of state regimentation. Everything worked smoothly, there was apparently no room for tensions, disagreements, mischief, excitement or innovation, nor for controlled conflict and strife (Elias 1981: 19).

The rationalistic strand has tended, explicitly or implicitly, to dominate Marxist writings, producing a tendency to champion, often for polemical purposes, a state of more-or-less total human freedom and self-determination as a political goal. The more realistic question of how far social constraints can be removed at a given stage is seldom asked, probably because, within Marxist polarities, such questions would smack of ‘reform’ or conservatism. As Elias says, the paradox of rationalist utopias is that ‘while attempting to counter one type of social oppression, they imply another’ (Elias 1981: 19). [8] That is, that in conditions of tension and strife utopias reproduce people’s wish-dreams of social harmony, when in fact such a society would have less external regulation because of a higher level of individual affect-control and self-regulation, which the utopian writers in their society cannot envisage. Consequently, their rational utopia would imply reinstating further external state control or constraint at that stage to produce the greater social harmony which their relatively low level of self-regulation would not otherwise permit.

(d) Even though the practical questions asked by the later Marxist practitioners and writers related closely to the circumstances they lived through, the way they interpreted the possibilities for realising the socialist utopia in their societies was determined by the basic assumptions of their inherited framework. For example, it has induced its adherents into asking questions such as: What is preventing the proletarian revolution from taking place, given that the level of socio-economic development seems apposite? What are the cultural mechanisms whereby working class consciousness is systematically dismantled? Is there a substitute proletariat to be seen? And against the proposition that political activity should be geared towards the goal of the revolutionary victory of the proletariat, which will traditionally usher in the socialist utopia of equality and freedom, all other activity towards, say, minimising social inequality or certain forms of social constraint, can only be described as ‘reformism’. Revolution versus reform is a Marxist antinomy which flows directly from a theory which assumes that practical activity can hasten the arrival of an idealised society said to be embodies as a utopia in a master economic process of history. Many Marxists have expended a lot of energy moving between the poles of this fallacious antinomy.

The two recent examples of Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas will illustrate the general point I am making about the assumptions of the Marxist tradition. In both cases there is at work a fascinating interplay between the social developments they are responding to and the presuppositions of the theory they are bringing to bear on them – Marxism. Adorno justified his doggedly philosophical stance after the late 1930s because the historical opportunity for the emancipation of mankind by the revolution of the proletariat had been ‘missed’ (Adorno 1973: 3). As a result, he was condemned to maintain the ‘negative’ critique of society which shows the existing order as perennially capable of become something other than it is. This philosophising keeps alive the possibility of human emancipation. But this strategy still assumed, however, that the proletarian revolution should have occurred and that if it had done so it would have liberated mankind. In other words, Adorno took seriously, as a real possibility, the social consequences predicted by the mythological strand in Marx’s thought, that is the practical fusion of Is and Ought in a future world of human association for which history had been preparing us. Once one has made that assumption, then its non-arrival leads to the conviction that the idealised sequence is more important than the empirical reality and is something to which empirical conditions must ultimately adjust themselves. (This assumption, as I will show later, appears also in the work of Karl-Otto Apel.) But, if it is held that the moment to realise ‘human emancipation’ has been lost, then this position represents a kind of theological picture in which, in the present conditions, mankind is living if not in a fallen state, then certainly in purgatory. The result of this position is a tragic pessimism and nihilism.

In the work of Habermas we can see how he operates within the inertia of the Marxist tradition and takes up from Adorno the redefinition of the problem of the realisation of the socialist utopia after Stalinism and fascism and in the light of the thesis of the disenchantment of the world elaborated by philosophers in modern times (see Heinemann 1953 and Steiner 1978: chapters II and III). I will concentrate on only one aspect of his work which is most relevant to my topic, the notion of the ideal speech situation (Habermas 1970). Built into all individual speech acts, he says, is the assumption that one can be understood by potential interlocutors who are equal partners in the discourse. This is a transcendental presupposition for all communication. This idealised state of affairs is, however, no mere abstract utopia, for it is partly present now, in society, in every individual speech act. It is, therefore, not an arbitrary postulate of a total community of equality, for it is already, as it were, partly realised. The postulate thus provides a critical yardstick (or ‘regulative principle’ in Apel) for objectively evaluating given societies as only providing conditions of ‘distorted communication’ compared with those implied by the idea speech situation, which those instances of distorted communication effectively also are .

In this respect, Habermas’s theory constitutes the reappearance of Left Hegelian ‘critique’ in a modern guise. The ideal-speech situation corresponds to Hegel’s telos of self-knowing Reason which is embodied as absolute universality in all particularity, but known categorically in the Idea. Habermas has grounded more systematically in a theory of communication Adorno’s Hegelian appeal to the ‘utopian moment of the object’ and his battle against ‘identity thinking’ in order to preserve ‘negative’ criticism of social reality in terms of its ideality (see Rose 1976). There is also perhaps a distant echo in this aspect of Habermas’s work of the existentialists’ insistence that both inauthenticity and authenticity are distinctive, necessary and irreducible modes of existence. Habermas’s theory entails that conditions sustaining some distorted communication must, dialectically speaking, always exists for the ideal-speech situation to have its transcendental existence and thus critical power. (I will return to this argument.)

The point about Adorno and Habermas is that it is the Marxist tradition itself, as adapted to twentieth century social conditions and certain theoretical developments, which provides the framework which has posed their problems and the parameters of the theoretical solutions. Their philosophical approach only picks up the philosophical character and residues of this tradition of social science itself. Critical Theory, therefore, reproduces the Marxist socialist theory of utopia without the original agent for its realisation, the proletariat (which has deserted its historical mission) and without the original catalyst, the revolutionary socialist party (which has proved itself as having totalitarian implications) and without the concept of historical necessity (theoretically discredited). The result is that the ‘critical’ theory remaining (and this applies also, for different reasons, to the Marxist humanism of East European writers) had to replace the old utopian level in Marxist theory with an idealised state of affairs. This idealisation takes the form of either the ideal-speech situation or the idea of the still unachieved socialist utopia. In both cases it is a state of affairs which is regarded as inevitably un realisable.

There are two main reasons for this feature. (a) To repeat, the utopia cannot any longer be justified in any form as the outcome of historical necessity. The critical theorists are ‘modernists’ who, following Max Weber as well as Nietzsche and the existentialists, implicitly accept that since the Middle Ages, European peoples have come increasingly to regard society as depleted of inherent religious meaning. After the ‘death of God’, the Marxist concept of historical necessity only reproduces Christian theology in a secular form, with socialism taking the place of heaven. (And in any case, the moment to realise this outcome has been missed.) Moreover, historical necessity is associated with the ideology of orthodox Soviet Marxism, which was at least, it is argued, a necessary condition for Stalinism, since this form of positivistic Marxism lent itself to central party rule and directive practices. (b) To suggest that there was a real possibility of the realisation of the idealised state of affairs of the socialist utopia would lend itself to abuse by bureaucratic socialist élites in practice because it would provide them with the theoretical justification for claiming that the society they ruled was its embodiment.

Zygmunt Bauman is acutely aware of the possible outcome mentioned in (b) above. He therefore shifts the emphasis away from characterising socialism solely in the classical Marxist economic terms as a society in which the means of production have been placed in public hands. This view lends itself to socialism becoming reduced to a description of such a society, rather than a social goal to be achieved: ‘Whatever inspiring power socialism can justly boast is drawn from its utopian status’ (Bauman 1976: 36). He regards socialism as the ‘counter-culture of capitalist society [...] the fulcrum on which the emancipatory criticism-through-relativisation of the current reality rests’ (ibid). This vision of socialism as critique, as aspiration and hope, is heavily influenced by the experience of bureaucratic oppression in socialist societies in Eastern Europe. Bauman’s conception of socialism as an ‘active utopia’ lends itself well to providing a means of criticising the oppression and inequality present in those societies which, at the same time, profess to be socialist societies. But his model, like all those theories of the catalytic function of utopias (or of their ‘regulative’ character) which juxtapose the real conditions against a projected or unrealised ideal, or universal criterion of some kind, contains an immanent paradox. It is expressed by Bauman in this passage:

Socialism shares with all other utopias the unpleasant quality of retaining its fertility only in so far as it resides in the realm of the possible. The moment it is proclaimed as accomplished, as empirical reality, it loses its creative power; far from inflaming human imagination, it puts on the agenda in turn an acute demand for a new horizon, distant enough to transcend and relativise its own limitations (Bauman 1976: 36).

However, Berki (1981: 262) has rightly drawn attention to the contradiction involved in this idea that the critical power of the socialist utopia resides in the realm of the possible. On the one hand, he says, Bauman wants to retain the transcendent, cultural sense of socialism, but then elsewhere in his book (Bauman 1976) appears to advocate that it can feasibly be built or achieved in reality, for which a revision of people’s commonsense beliefs is a prerequisite. But in that event, of course the socialist utopia would not perform a critical function.

The same contradiction is present in the rationalistic ‘new apriorism’ of Karl-Otto-Apel, but in this case its consequences are extraordinary. In a similar fashion to that of Habermas, Apel claims that the real communication community which has developed socially and historically presupposes an ideal communication community in which people are capable of adequately understanding each other’s arguments and judging their truth (Apel 1980: 282). From this transcendental argument he derives two ‘regulative principles’ both designed to form a basis for the ‘long-term moral strategy of action for every human being’ (ibid). One is for actions ensuring the survival of the real communication community and the other is for ‘realizing the ideal communication community in the real one’ (ibid). Having established this philosophical position, Apel then succumbs to the same paradoxical possibility which arises when one enters the discourse which juxtaposes real circumstances against some kind of ideal. Apel cannot resist toying, like Bauman does with the unachieved socialist utopia, with the possibility that the ideal communication community can actually be realised, as a feasible project when, if it was to be achieved, its function as a universal ‘regulative principle’ would be abolished.

All he claims to have proved is a transcendental philosophical justification for the ‘cause of emancipation’ (Apel 1980: 285). But this conclusion does not entitle him to declare that ‘the ideal norms that must be presupposed in order for any argument to have meaning [...] are in principle destined to be realized in a concrete society’; nor to advocate critically reconstructing real societies ‘in the light of the ideal of the unlimited communication community that is to be realized in society ’ (Apel 1980: 140 my emphasis) assuming he intends the latter statement to be taken literally. At another point, however, Apel swings the other way, claiming that the contradiction between the real and the ideal communication communities is a matter of the ‘hitherto undecided dialectics of history’ (Apel 1980: 281), a contradiction which, as Hegel taught, we must endure. But then comes the Kantian imperative that ‘one must morally postulate the historical resolution of this contradiction’ (Apel 1980: 282).

In conclusion, like Adorno, Apel takes seriously the possibility of the abstract, total and undifferentiated ‘emancipation’ of mankind as a plausible project and a feasible goal, since he tries transcendentally to ground this ‘cause’ on the epistemological and ethical levels. In other words, he implicitly gives credence to the mythological, utopian level of Marx’s theory, which he then allows to direct his philosophical effort. Writing in the contemporary world, he unreflectively takes for granted a problem dictated by the inertia of the Marxist tradition. That is to say, how to ground, in a non-arbitrary way, the possibility of a rationalistic socialist utopia of human fraternity when, in modern conditions after Stalinism and fascism, we can no longer assume its inevitability in theory or in practice. Having gone down this road, Apel inevitably reaches the following utopian conclusion: ‘the task of realizing the ideal communication community also implies the transcendence of a class society [...] or [...] the elimination of all socially determined asymmetries of interpersonal dialogue’ (Apel 1980: 283). But this statement is a sociologically nonsensical conviction.

Apel could agree, of course that my last point is, realistically speaking, quite correct, but that does not mean that striving for the realisation of the ideal communication community should not form an imperative, a spur for our endeavours. This position would be consistent with his view that one must ‘morally postulate’ the historical resolution of the contradiction between the ideal and the real communication communities. The idea of such a resolution gives meaning, he says, to the goal of ensuring the survival of the species ‘ qua real communication community’ (Apel 1980: 282). But, as we have seen it is very clear that for a number of reasons, both internal to the notion and externally in societies, idealised states of affairs in utopian discourse, by their very nature, cannot be realised. But, nonetheless, Apel’s theory exhorts us to derive our life’s meaning from working towards the realisation of something that we know is intrinsically unachievable. This is nihilism. [9] The apparently positive and creative overtones of this neo-utopian position are illusory. What follows from it is that like a housewife or a child who can never live up to internalised images of the perfect housewife or child, we are also condemned to frustration, we can never fully give ourselves kudos, we can never feel fully satisfied, because we know that against some perfect, but always unattainable ideal, our efforts will always fall short.

Finally, it could be objected that my previous arguments are illegitimate because I have failed to grasp the non-empirical character of transcendental inquiry, which is an autonomous level of reflection looking only for the cognitive or normative conditions of possibility of various empirical aspects of science, social life, history or politics. Hence, I am pointing out the inconsistencies and paradoxes involved in the empirical realisation of an idealised state of affairs which, by its nature, exists on a different, non-empirical, transcendental plane in and through real, historical, empirical societies. Therefore, the argument would run, even when striving for some realistic, immediate, empirical, short-term social goal, say the mitigation of specific inequalities or injustices, transcendentally presupposed in such activity is an ideal state of equality which non-arbitrarily gives ‘emancipatory’ meaning to that activity. But even granting, for the sake of argument, the autonomy of this level of inquiry, I remain unconvinced of the cognitive value of the highly abstract transcendental presuppositions elaborated. To repeat the previous example, Apel argues that an ideal ‘unlimited community of interpretation’ (Apel 1980: 123) is a transcendental presupposition of critical discussion and all speech acts. It would be easy to dismiss this finding as a high-flown way of expressing the banality that when people speak to each other they normally assume they will be understood. But, taking transcendental inquiry seriously, it is surely legitimate to ask what is the significance and the cognitive pay-off of the proposition that all empirical speech acts have in common the idea of mutual understanding? Is this transcendental ‘finding’ not an empty abstraction ? Is it not just as empty as, say, the statement that the amoeba and man have in common ‘life’?

Richard Kilminster is Honorary Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Leeds. He previously studied at the Universities of Essex (BA), Leicester (MA) where he was taught by Norbert Elias; and Leeds where he gained his PhD under Zygmunt Bauman in 1976. He taught there until 2010. In the 1980s he worked with Elias at the University of Bielefeld as part of the Utopieforschung Group. He is author of Praxis and Method: A Sociological Dialogue with Lukács, Gramsci and the Early Frankfurt School (1979, reissued 2014 with a new Foreword by the author); The Sociological Revolution: From the Enlightenment to the Global Age (1998, paperback 2002); and Norbert Elias: Post-philosophical Sociology (2007) and numerous articles on the sociology of knowledge. He is Chair of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Collected Works of Norbert Elias, has edited volume I, The Early Writings (2006) and The Symbol Theory (revised edition 2011); and co-edited (with Stephen Mennell) three volumes of Essays (2008—09), On The Process of Civilisation (2010) and Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections (2013) all with UCD Press, Dublin.

• Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Negative Dialectics , trans E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Anderson, Perry (1974a) Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism , London: New Left Review Editions.
• —- (1974b) Lineages of the Absolutist State , London: New Left Review Editions.
• Apel, Karl-Otto (1980) Towards a Transformation of Philosophy , trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Armytage, W.H.G. (1968) Yesterday’s Tomorrows: A Historical Survey of Future Societies , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Bauman, Zygmunt (1976) Socialism: The Active Utopia , London: George Allen & Unwin.
• Bell, Daniel et al. (1967) ‘Working Session One: Alternative Futures’, Daedalus (Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), Vol. 96, No.3: 666–679.
• Berki, R.N. (1981) On Political Realism , London: J.M. Dent & Sons.
• Bullock, Alan (1977) Is History Becoming a Social Science?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Burke, Peter (1980) Sociology and History , London: George Allen & Unwin.
• Clark, T.J. (1973a) The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851, Berkeley: University of California Press.
• —- (1973b) Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press.
• —- (1974) ‘The conditions of artistic creation’, Times Literary Supplement , 24th May: 562.
• Dahrendorf, Ralf (1959) ‘Out of Utopia’ in his Essays in the Theory of Society , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, reprinted 1972.
• Dumont, René (1974) Utopia or Else, London: Andre Deutsch.
• Dunn, John (1968) ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy , Vol. 43, No.164 (Apr): 85–104.
• Elias, Norbert (1981) ‘Eine kurze Notiz zum Begriff der Utopie und den Aufgaben der Utopieforschung’, mimeographed, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung, Universität Bielefeld (unpublished). [Copy in Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach]
• —- (2009 [1982], ‘Thomas More’s critique of the state: with some thoughts on a definition of the concept of utopia’, The Collected Works, Essays I, Vol 14. Dublin: UCD Press.
• —- (2007 [1987]), Involvement and Detachment, The Collected Works, Vol 8. Dublin: UCD Press.
• —- (2012 [1939]), On The Process of Civilisation: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Collected Works, Vol 3 . Dublin: UCD Press.
• Engels, Frederick (1880) ‘Socialism, Utopian and Scientific’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume , London: Lawrence &Wishart, 1974.
• Foster, John (1974) Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution , London: Weidenfeld& Nicholson.
• Giddens, Anthony (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction , London: Macmillan.
• Goodwin, Barbara (1978) Social Science and Utopia: Nineteenth-Century Models of Social Harmony , Sussex: Harvester Press.
• Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci , ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1970) 'Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence', in Hans Peter Drietzel (ed.) Recent Sociology No.2 , New York: Macmillan.
• Heinemann, F.H. (1953) Existentialism and the Modern Predicament , London: Adam and Charles Black.
• Horowitz, Irving Louis (1961) Philosophy, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge, Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
• Kahn, Herman & Wiener, Anthony J. (1967) ‘The Next Thirty-Three Years: A Framework for Speculation‘, Daedalus (Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), Vol. 96, No.3: 705–732.
• Kilminster, Richard (1979) Praxis and Method: A Sociological Dialogue with Lukács, Gramsci and the Early Frankfurt School , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul [reissued with a new Foreword by the author, 2014].
• —- (1982) 'Theory and Practice in Marx and Marxism', in (ed.) G.H.R. Parkinson, Marx and Marxisms, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• —- (2013) ‘Critique and Overcritique in Sociology’, Human Figurations: Long-term perspectives on the human condition , Volume 2, No.2, July (online journal).
• Kolakowski, Leszek (1971a) ‘Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth’, in his Marxism and Beyond , London: Paladin.
• —- (1971b) ‘The priest and the jester’ in his Marxism and Beyond , London: Paladin.
• Lasky, Melvin J. (1977) Utopia and Revolution , London: Macmillan.
• Laslett, Peter (1968) ‘History and the Social Sciences’, in David L. Sills (Ed.) International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan and the Free Press.
• —- (1977) Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Levitas, Ruth (1979) ‘Sociology and Utopia’, Sociology, Vol.13, No.1: 19–33.
• Löwith, Karl (1932) Max Weber and Karl Marx , trans. Hans Fantel, eds with introduction, Tom Bottomore & William Outhwaite, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982.
• Mannheim, Karl (1929) Ideology and Utopia , trans. Edward A. Shils & Louis Wirth, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960.
• Manuel, Frank E. & Manuel, Fritzie P. (1979) Utopian Thought in the Western World , Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Marwick, Arthur (1970) The Nature of History , reprinted 1976, London: Macmillan.
• Marx, Karl (1844) ‘Introduction’ to the ‘Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ’, in David McLellan (ed) Karl Marx: Early Texts , Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971.
• —- (1845a) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume , London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974.
• Marx, Karl (1845b) The Holy Family , trans. R. Dixon, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1956.
• —- (1859) ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the critique of political economy , in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume , London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974.
• Marx, Karl (with Engels, Frederick) (1845) The German Ideology , London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965.
• McLellan, David (ed) (1971) Karl Marx: Early Texts , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Mendelsohn, Everett, Weingart, Peter & Whitley, Richard (Eds) (1977) The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge , Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
• Neusüss, Arnhelm (Hg.) (1968) Utopie: Begriff und Phänomen des Utopischen , Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand.
• Plath, David (ed.) (1971) Aware of Utopia , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Plattel, Martin G. (1972) Utopian and Critical Thinking , Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
• Polak, Fred. L. (1973) The Image of the Future , Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Ltd.
• Rose, Gillian (1976) ‘How is critical theory possible?: Theodor W. Adorno and concept formation in sociology’, Political Studies , Vol. XXIV, No.1: 69–85.
• Rotenstreich, Nathan (1977) Theory and Practice: An Essay in Human Intentionalities , The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
• Schmidt, Alfred (1971) The Concept of Nature in Marx , trans. Ben Fowkes, London: New Left Books.
• Shon, Donald A. (1967) ‘Forecasting and Technological Forecasting’, Daedalus (Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), Vol. 96, No.3: 759–770.
• Skinner, Quentin (1969) ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, History and Theory , Vol 8, No.1: 3–53.
• Shils, Edward A. (1970) 'Tradition, Ecology and Institution in the History of Sociology', in his The Constitution of Society. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982: 275–383.
• Simonds, A.P. (1978) Karl Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Spiegel-Rösing, Ina & de Solla Price, Derek (eds) (1977) Science, Technology and Society: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, London and Berkeley, Sage Publications.
• Steiner, George (1978) Heidegger , London: Fontana/Collins.
• Tilly, Charles (1981) As Sociology Meets History , London, Academic Press.
• Voßkamp, Wilhelm (ed.) (1982) Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopia, Band 1, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag.
• Walsh, Chad (1962) From Utopia to Nightmare , London: Godfrey Bles.
• Weber, Max (1918) 'Politics as a Vocation' in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , (eds) H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

How to Think Like a Utopian

Strive to be both idealistic enough to envision a new world and pragmatic enough to steadily build it.

By Malia Wollan

“It’s important that you have some idea of where you want to go, some kind of dream,” says Rutger Bregman, 33, a Dutch historian and author who has written about utopian thinking. Don’t underestimate the power of outlandish ideas. Throughout history, many significant milestones — democracy, the abolition of slavery, equal rights for men and women — began as utopian dreams. “It always starts with people who are first dismissed as unreasonable and unrealistic,” Bregman says.

To engage in utopian thinking, you can’t be myopically focused on the present. There’s nothing inherent about our current political, economic and social realities; people made these systems and can make them anew. To envision something novel, read more history and less news. A sensationalistic daily news cycle can constrict your ability to see the world as anything but dangerous, violent and mean. “There’s nothing as anti-utopian as the product that we call the news,” Bregman says. Let your interests be expansive. Read philosophy and psychology. Look around and think, It doesn’t have to be this way. “Take something like poverty; why does it exist?” he says. “We’ve heard things like ‘the poor will always be with us,’ but is that really true?” What if poverty weren’t taken as a given? Sometimes it helps to imagine what future historians will make of us. What will they see? How will they judge us?

Utopianism doesn’t require you to be optimistic. In fact, that kind of “don’t worry, everything will work out” view can lead to complacency. Instead, be hopeful in a way that moves you toward action. To be a utopian takes grand, ambitious thinking. But when it comes to implementing these ideas into policies and practice, Bregman suggests a humble, tinkering approach; overzealous attachment to utopian blueprints can be dangerous.

You can be a utopian and still enjoy dystopian fictional narratives. “Dystopias tend to be much better entertainment,” Bregman says. Notice, though, if those plotlines start eroding your view of human nature. To think like a utopian, it helps to believe that humans are fundamentally decent. Be cautious if your utopias all involve technological fixes or escapist colonies on Mars. The work of imagining futures is hard. “In this era of climate breakdown and the extinction of species, it’s obviously easier to think of how it all could end than how it could become much, much better,” Bregman says. That better world, that is the work.

Explore The New York Times Magazine

Donald Trump’s Rally Rhetoric : No major American presidential candidate has talked like he now does at his rallies  — not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Trump himself.

The King of Tidy Eating : Rapturously messy food reviews are all over the internet. Keith Lee’s discreet eating style rises above them all .

What Are Animals Really Feeling? : Animal-welfare science tries to get inside the minds  of a huge range of species — in order to help improve their lives.

Can a Sexless Marriage Be Happy?: Experts and couples are challenging the conventional wisdom  that sex is essential to relationships.

Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule : Here’s how they set boundaries , navigate jealousy, wingman their spouses and foster community.

• Andrew Goldstone
• Christopher Kark
• Christopher Warley
• Claire Seiler
• Eleanor Courtemanche
• Gregory Freidin
• Gregory Jusdanis
• Irakli Zurab Kakabadze
• Joseph Lease
• Meredith Ramirez Talusan
• Mike Chasar
• Roland Greene
• William Egginton
• William Flesch
• All Authors
• All Multimedia
• Republics of Letters

You are here

by   Debapriya Sarkar

My focus on “utopian” as a case study for the scope of critical semantics might at first seem surprising, since the project Roland Greene outlines in Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes rejects “canonical” terms to focus on “words of an everyday character” (14, 13). [ 1 ] These words, Greene demonstrates, “are not the most ordinary,” but despite primarily being “important within local fields of knowledge such as rhetoric or political theory, [they] tend to appear in general discourse as though they were ordinary, their capaciousness taken for granted” (13, 14). As we may recognize, the word “utopian” fits in only awkwardly within this framework. Along with its famous lexical neighbor, “utopia”, it has certainly not escaped the attention of readers, both early modern and modern. Yet, this “not the most ordinary” of words does seem to be—or at least become—of “everyday character” within the century it was coined; unlike the original examples of Five Words (language, blood, world, invention, and resistance), the term “utopian” originated in the sixteenth century itself. It thus seems primed to mobilize the project of critical semantics in new ways, as it provides us a glimpse of the extravagant capacities of recent words that are (in theory) free from, or at least less burdened by, past linguistic associations.

The term “utopian” originally denoted specific things: as a noun, it referred to inhabitants of Thomas More’s Utopia (“the utopians”), and as an adjective it described the nature of this fictional place (“the utopian commonwealth”). But over the course of the century it became ubiquitous in different forms of writing and came to refer to varied entities—including kinds of people, cognitive formulations, and imaginative states. Its liminal status—simultaneously “everyday” and “canonical”—enables us to test the bounds of which words might escape our purview if we do not focus on their “ordinary” nature despite their canonicity in our critical discourse. In this essay, I explore how “utopian” was an extraordinary word that became ordinary, a particular term that became general, and a reference to a physical place that became an idea. As such, the notion of “change” that lies at the “foreground of [Greene’s] argument” (8) about critical semantics is vital to understanding the capaciousness of “utopian”, making it ideal to think with about how words at the threshold of canonicity and ordinariness can expand the scope of the project.

I’ll begin by focusing on the ways in which “utopian” aligns with the project of critical semantics, which explores “words that early modern people not only thought through but lived with” (5). We see such vibrancy in the usages of “utopian”. Unsurprisingly, it is an adjective that describes particulars of Thomas More’s text. Ralph Robinson’s 1551 translation discusses “This boke of ye vtopian commen wealth,” and in the second edition of the translation (1556), the “Printer to the Reader” mentions “The Vtopian Alphabete.” [ 2 ] But its usage became much more expansive within a few decades, as writers across varied disciplines applied it in diverse contexts. Robert Burton writes in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that “Vtopian parity is a thing to be wished for rather then effected,” and John Milton declares in his challenge to censorship and licensing, Areopagitica (1644), that “to sequester out of the world into Atlantick and Eutopian polities which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evill, in the midd’st whereof God hath plac’t us unavoidably.” [ 3 ] These examples signal the word’s migration from its initial reference to a particular place to a general idea—an idea that often carried negative connotations of impracticality and impossibility, whether in an unachievable “Vtopian parity” or as inaccessible “Eutopian polities.” Even when not used negatively, it denoted impractical, idealistic, or unrealistic beliefs about society’s perfectibility. For example, John Donne uses it to describe purity or inexperience (“To Sir Henry Wotton” (1633)):

if men, which in these places live, Durst look in themselves, and themselves retrieve, They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then Utopian youth grown old Italian (43-46).

And in another instance, Samuel Purchas uses it to describe a general ideal place ( Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613)): “no Vtopian State comparable to theirs.” [ 4 ] These examples demonstrate how, losing its rootedness in the specific island of Utopia, “ utopian” becomes omnipresent as a concept of unreality, impracticality, and even impossibility for a wide range of early modern writers.  

These qualities also hint at the word’s fit with another goal of critical semantics: to consider terms that run across languages, eras, disciplines, and genres. “Utopian” is definitionally transcultural. Derived from the Greek word ou-topos (no-place), but also punning on eu-topos (good place), the nonexistence or the ideality of the word is graspable only in translation. These dual cross-linguistic connotations drive the humor in More’s Utopia on the topic of the perfect island’s unlocatability, as the author’s humanist interlocutors across Europe construct elaborate paratextual materials to bolster the idea that this place actually exists. But the question of existence—or we might say the certainty of its non-existence—was not a laughing matter; it becomes a serious point of distinction for travel-writers who established the realities of their discovered realms by distinguishing them from Utopia’s fictionality and its no-placeness. As Humphrey Gilbert writes in Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (1576), “ YOV might iustly haue charged mee with an vnsetled head if I had at any time taken in hand, to discouer Vtopia , or any countrey fained by imagination: But Cataia is none such, it is a countrey, well knowen to be described and set foorth by all moderne Geographers. ” [ 5 ] Gilbert reverses the central tenet of More’s text, relying on the idea that his readers are universally in agreement about Utopia being a “countrey fained by imagination.”

“Utopian” thus crosses disciplines and genres, like the five words that Greene uses to demonstrate the work of critical semantics. It spills over from fiction to travel-writing to political tracts, and even to proto-scientific ventures. For instance, in England, Samuel Hartlib’s network of reformers relied on utopian models to propose improvements in agriculture, education, and natural philosophy. The Hartlib circle’s ideas reflect the term’s aspirational quality (its ideality, we might say), rather than its impracticality. Here, “utopian” refers to achievable improvements. Contrary to the dismissive tone adopted by travel writers, the word signifies future opportunities for Hartlibian reformers who use it to outline visions or plans of proposed projects in England, Ireland, and even the New World. [ 6 ] Perhaps their embrace of the ethos of utopian projects underscores the extreme oscillations between reality and fiction that are latent in the term itself—rather than stress the differences between the two, Hartlibians suggest that the conditions they observe in their extant societies can be molded into the utopian domains that so far only exist in their imaginations. In this formulation, utopian endeavors seem to represent not a difference in kind from actuality but a difference in degree. Reaching the fictional ideal becomes the goal in the actual world, and it is only a matter of time before the two realms converge.

These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century applications of the term already gesture to how “utopian” aligns with perhaps what we might consider the key methodological feature of critical semantics. The project “name[s] words” not only in terms of “semantic integers that one finds in a dictionary” but also through the “concepts that shadow them” (3-4). It looks for “models for semantic change” (8) to track words through “conceits…[that] are native to the long sixteenth century” (10). It can be productive to consider the ambivalent significations of “utopian” under this rubric. I propose the conceptual “shadow” of “utopian” is “hypothetical,” another term with a rich scope in early modern discourse. The word “hypothetical” was associated with conjecture, speculation, even fanciful suppositions, and its usage ranged across disciplines, from astronomy (as we see in the writings of Copernicus) to logic (see, for instance, Abraham Fraunce Lawiers Logike , 1588) to experimental philosophy (see Robert Hooke’s Micrographia , 1665). [ 7 ] Long sixteenth-century thinkers commonly understood the term as suppositional, or as “something supposed or assumed to be true without proof or conclusive evidence.” [ 8 ] In an era of increasing attention to empiricism and experiment, this tie with supposition could have negative connotations, and a hypothesis could be dismissed as “A groundless or insufficiently grounded supposition”—a dismissal starkly similar to those leveled against utopian endeavors. [ 9 ] I wish to suggest that the term “utopian” offers early moderns a hypothetical way of approaching the world: as conjectures, speculations, and suppositions about what could be. In other words, the idea of the “hypothetical” did not only designate for early modern thinkers a method for interpreting the world. It also captured a state of being that was repeatedly ascribed to utopian realms: as-yet-unproved ways of existence that could be dismissed as impractical goals or celebrated as aspirational ideals. Thus, if we fully connect the conceit to our word of choice, we could say that utopian embodies a hypothetical ontology; it emerged as a concept of non-existence. The resonances between the flexible, cross-disciplinary applications of “hypothetical” and “utopian” illuminate why, for early modern thinkers, the latter term could transform from an extra-ordinary word associated with a specific fictional place into an idea or a notion of speculation, conjecture, or idealization. Such varied usages of “utopian” solidify its status as a capacious concept that structured crucial intellectual and philosophical questions of the time on epistemology, truth, and ontology.

As we can observe, “utopian” is a perfect candidate in our search of new transcultural keywords. It is the ambivalence of the term—like that of the original Five Words —that animates its varied applications. The word bolsters the idea that conceits drive the work of critical semantics. It also underscores that if Five Words outlines a “keywords” project, its objects of study are conceptual keywords. But how might such new keywords function not only as mere examples of critical semantics as it exists, but also as intellectual instruments that put pressure on—and can thereby broaden—the project’s central claims and methodology? Greene already embeds such a question in the “Introduction” to Five Words. He concludes this chapter by highlighting the problem of method: “I really do not know that the project of Five Words can be done” (14). This uncertainty about outcome is of course, an invitation, not only to test this “resolutely elemental approach” that operates at the “cellular level” (3) (by thinking through words rather than through historical events, authors, or works), but also to examine the scope of the project itself. In this spirit, I’ll conclude by gesturing to the ways in which “utopian” not only underscores the conceptual (conceit-based, perhaps metaphorical) foundation of critical semantics, but also how it intimates the project’s expandability.

Like the initial Five Words , “utopian” functions as a “vesse[l] of change” (173): even though it emerges from a work of fiction, and even though it sometimes operates as a metonym for fictionality itself, its greater efficacy lies in continually putting pressure on the bounds between reality and fiction. For our purposes, “utopian” highlights that the changes we trace through “shadow” concepts or “conceits,” are latent in keywords themselves. In other words, we must think of “utopian” as a word-concept, rather than treating the two parts of this hyphenated term as separate or suggesting that one precedes the other. I say this because it is utopian’s cross-linguistic playfulness with ideas—and specifically with the duality of no-placeness and ideality—that motivates users to test, expand, even mock the bounds between truth and falsehood. Notions of conjecture, unfeasibility, and ideals undergird the word. It is by applying the central methodological feature of critical semantics that we fully grasp this complexity; its conceptual shadow (of hypothetical) enables us to fully recognize how “ utopian” becomes an ordinary word that circulates, and finally comes to stand in for, these underlying notions. This brief exploration also reveals that the term—ubiquitous in twenty-first century discourse as a referent to a generic ideal society or idea, and as a word that has been completely stripped from its particular links to More’s humanist text and context—was shifting gears from the particular to the general almost immediately after its invention. Users in the long sixteenth century were deploying it just as extravagantly and loosely (or generously, we might say) as we do today. Thus, as “utopian”, within a century of its conception, comes to refer to ideas as well as people and places, and as it oscillates between noun and adjective, it raises questions that take us beyond those raised by the original Five Words : How do words become ordinary? How (and how soon) does the shift between particulars and generals occur? How might adjectives, or for that matter other grammatical constructs, reshape a project that originally focused on nouns? What would it mean to expand critical semantics beyond the long sixteenth century (the temporal limitation set in Five Words ), given that there might be similarities in early modern and modern evolutions of certain terms? Such questions suggest that it is not only movements across languages, disciplines, and genres, but also change across time that is vital to the project. They also highlight how the processes of transformation, rather than final meanings, are important in understanding these keywords. Ultimately, as we turn to conceits to uncover ideas underlying a word, and as we recognize the ways in which early moderns “lived with” diverse undertones of a word that now seems “canonical” to us, we also discover how transcultural keywords were themselves concepts in potentia .  

I would like to thank Tara Lyons and Vin Nardizzi for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

[1] Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2013). All citations to the book are by page number.

[ 2 ] Thomas More, A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia. Trans. Ralph Robinson (London, 1551); Thomas More, A frutefull pleasaunt, [and] wittie worke, of the beste state of a publique weale, and of the newe yle, called Vtopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, 2 nd ed. (London, 1556).

[ 3 ] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621); John Milton, Areopagitica; a speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of vnlicens'd printing, to the Parlament of England (London, 1644).

[ 4 ] John Donne, Poems (London, 1633); Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage; or, Relations of the world and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered (London, 1613).

[ 5 ] Humphrey Gilbert, Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (London, 1576).

[ 6 ] For the classic study on this topic, see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660 2nd ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). I am referring to the ethos and language of texts such as Gabriel Platt’s A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641) and William Petty’s The advice of W.P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib. For the advancement of some particular parts of learning (1648).  

[ 7 ] See for instance, Andreas Osiander’s anonymous Preface to Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Nuremberg, 1543). Osiander declares the heliocentric theory to be a hypothesis that was used for calculations, or to “save appearances,” rather than demonstrating actual conditions of the universe. Abraham Fraunce, in The lawiers logike (London, 1588) writes “The woorde,  hypotheticall,  which is héere commonly vsed, is neither proper nor fit for this purpose. For, in absolute copulatiue and discretiue axiomes, there is no ὑπόθεσις, no condition at all.” In Micrographia (London, 1665), Robert Hooke discusses “The hypothetical height and density of the Air.”

[ 8 ] In this section, I draw on the OED definitions of the related terms “hypothesis” and “hypothetical” to trace their varied meanings in the early modern period. See “hypothetical, adj. and n.”. OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. (accessed December 10, 2017) and “hypothesis, n.”. OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. (accessed May 29, 2018).

[ 9 ] See “hypothesis, n.”. OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. (accessed May 29, 2018).

Join the Colloquy

Critical Semantics: New Transnational Keywords

View the discussion thread.

‘That Excellent Perfection’: A Short History of Utopia

• First Online: 02 December 2020

Cite this chapter

• Verena Adamik 3  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Utopianism ((PASU))

180 Accesses

The following chapter contextualizes utopianism, taking Thomas More’s Utopia and early modern Europe as the starting point of utopianism as we know it today. It furthermore argues that studying utopianism cannot solely rely on content (what the new society would look like) but needs to consider the utopian form (how this new society is described). The idea of closure plays a pivotal role for the utopian imagination. By this ‘utopian formalism,’ literature on utopian practice is here revealed to offer comments on how to think ‘outside’ the contemporary systemic order and in how far this is even considered possible. The second subchapter offers a cursory overview of the European ‘utopian’ history of North America up until the American Revolution, establishing that utopia, as we know it, is heavily entangled with modern nationhood and imperialism.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Right-wing, White supremacist utopias and dystopias are a fascinating topic, although reading them can certainly be fatiguing. To my knowledge, this field has yet to be studied in depth. Taking online publications into account, Lyman Tower Sargent speculated in a talk on “Themes in U.S. Eutopias and Dystopias in the Twenty-First Century” ( 2016 ) that the right-wing utopia may be the fastest-growing segment of literary utopias, which underlines the importance of further research. Michael Orth’s “Reefs on the Right: Fascist Politics in Contemporary Libertarian Utopias” ( 1990 ) and Peter Fitting’s “Utopias Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia” ( 1991 ) offer a starting point. Kenneth M. Roemer notes that blatant White supremacism was common in late nineteenth-century utopias (Roemer 1976 , 71; see also Chap. 5 ). Fitting draws attention to one problem regarding studying right-wing utopias: researchers are often reluctant to label right-wing literary utopias (as well as right-wing utopian communities) utopian because they think of utopianism as a feminist, and/or left-wing tool; hence, they do not want to apply utopian theory to these phenomena.

Parks, monasteries, vacation resorts, cemeteries, and a range of other places designed by humans link to utopianism, a point that Michel Foucault persuasively argued in “Of Other Spaces” ( 1967 ) but they are not utopian as such. As Foucault speculates, all societies are structured to include different spaces, some of which resemble utopias to a certain degree and thus are ‘Other,’ so-called heterotopia s .

Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica rang in the Enlightenment in 1687, one and a half centuries after More was beheaded in 1535.

In order to illustrate this idea of utopian harmony that amounts to the absence of dramatic elements, Robert Elliott relates the following story (which he, in turn, took from Michael Harrington in Cacotopias and Utopias ; Ferry et al. 1965 ): “at a writers’ conference in Moscow in the early 1930s André Malraux caused consternation by rising to ask, ‘What happens in a classless society when a streetcar runs over a beautiful girl?’ Gorky was hauled out of a sick-bed to deliver the answer, arrived at after a long debate: in a planned and classless society, a streetcar would not run over a beautiful girl. Years before, Etienne Cabet’s Icarians had come to similar conclusions; they had a law decreeing that there should be no accidents to pedestrians, whether caused by horses, vehicles, or anything whatever” ( 1970 , 79).

In A Modern Utopia ( 1905 ), the British author H.G. Wells criticized utopian conventions, taking issue with their tendency to stasis and their flat characters in particular: “The utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowhere and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. … But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic …. This is the first, most generalized difference between a Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were written in the former time” (xvi).

I myself could have never put it this smoothly and thank Kristina Baudemann for sharing this turn of phrase in a conversation.

To illustrate how utopias relate to the historical context of their creation, scholars like to draw on the image of the mirror. For example, Michel Foucault argues that utopias “have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down” ( 1967 , 24). Lyman Tower Sargent writes that “utopia is a mirror to the present designed to bring out flaws, a circus or funfair mirror in reverse” ( 2010 , xiii).

I develop this idea from various comments made by utopian scholars, specifically Dohra Ahmad, Antoine Hatzenberger, and Fredric Jameson. In Archaeologies of the Future , Jameson does not explicitly consider such self-referential commentary in literary utopias. However, his analysis of the symbolic closure in literary utopias implies that form and content are intertwined to the point where they stand in for one another: “to confront the way in which the secession of the Utopian imagination from everyday empirical Being takes the form of a temporal emergence and a historical transition, and in which the break that simultaneously secures the radical difference of the new Utopian society makes it impossible to imagine ” ( 2005 , 85–86, my emphasis). The secession that occurs in utopian narratives (such as the trench that created Utopia) then symbolizes the act of creating, that is, trying to imagine, the no place. A similar parallel is drawn by Antoine Hatzenberger in “Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia” ( 2003 ): “When reflecting on the question of the frontiers of utopia, it is necessary to engage with the problem of its limits—in the two senses of the term. Drawing the boundaries too sharply is indeed a way to avoid addressing some important difficulties intrinsic to the communication between a community and that which lies outside and to the implementation of principles of justice in international relations. Following the theorists who reflect today on how democracy can be better institutionalized on a global level, and on how to create a global citizenship, utopians should consider this possible opportunity for expanding the framework of utopia” (126).

I am here adapting metafictional theory, as developed, for example, by Linda Hutcheon ( 2013 ), Madelyn Jablon ( 1999 ), and Patricia Waugh ( 2003 ) to utopian studies.

A related oversight can be observed in literary and cultural studies, which took considerable time to acknowledge futurisms and utopianisms in African American and Native American literature, for instance.

Early exceptions to the erasure of Black utopian practice are Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumously published study on Africatown ( 2018 ), Sadie Smathers Patton’s The Kingdom of the Happy Land ( 1957 ) on the settlement of that name (1865–ca. 1900), Promiseland by Elizabeth Rauh Bethel ( 1981 ) on Promiseland, South Carolina (1870–ongoing), and William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease’s Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America ( 1963 ). For more recent studies on utopian practice outside of the White privilege paradigm consider, for example, Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War ( 2005 ). Charles Price et al. ( 2008 ) have discussed the Ghost Dance movement, the Rastafari, and the long-durée Maya movement as utopian. The collection West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (2012) includes an essay that views the Occupation of Alcatraz by a pan-Indigenous group of activists as utopian practice (Stone 2012 ), while another considers the communalism of the Black Panthers (Spencer 2012 ). Nele Sawallisch ( 2016 ) touches upon the subject in her work on Black people moving to Canada in the nineteenth century, for example, by discussing the Dawn settlement in Ontario (founded 1841). Very recently, Lyman Tower Sargent ( 2020 ) has compiled an extensive overview of African American utopianisms, including utopian practice, which may provide a useful starting point for those who want to contribute further to the field. Freedmen’s towns and settlements by Exodusters certainly merit further investigation and discussion, and such research will likely yield more examples of African American utopian practice.

For this reason, I am reluctant to haphazardly apply a utopian framework to Native American settlements here without an alternative genealogy. I offer some small tentative suggestions on the complicated relationship between Native American cultures and utopianism in Chaps. 6 and 8 . There, I am also pointing to scholars who have more fruitfully pondered the issue.

There are, of course, exceptions to this observation: Feminist utopian communities do exist. Those in the Womyn’s Land network, for example, are exclusively female.

These numbers only serve to indicate a trend. For one, the extensive bibliography does not claim completeness. Second, it cannot factor out the racial bias of the publishing industry and archives. Third, while nationalities, as well as ethnic minorities, are listed as categories, there is no category for White, or any comparable denomination, implying White to be synonymous with US American. This connects to point number four: the author (or the ethnicity of the author) of some of the works included may be unknown and so she/he would be listed as US American. Nonetheless, the extreme disparity indicates that utopia is a genre dominated by White people, especially when considering that Lyman Tower Sargent deliberately applies a rather broad definition of utopia for this bibliography. Corroborating these findings, Kenneth Roemer describes a similar trend at the end of the nineteenth century: looking at a sample of roughly two hundred utopian texts, he observes that the authors, “with few exceptions … were Protestant, native American, white, male, and middle-aged (about fifty-years old in 1894)” ( 1976 , 9).

On the subject of such projections, I recommend Jeffrey Knapp’s An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest ( 1994 ) and Antonis Balasopoulos’s “Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism” ( 2004 ), as well as Dejal Kadir’s Columbus and the Ends of the Earth ( 1992 ). For an insightful discussion of later English utopian visions (from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century) and how they influence the stylization of the United States consult Wil Verhoeven’s Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 ( 2013 ).

Oneida (1848–1881) was a religious utopian community in New York, famous for practicing a system of regimented polygamy called ‘Complex Marriage’ and a eugenic breeding program ( stirpiculture ) which scandalized outsiders. As accounts of members illustrate, John Humphrey Noyes was a manipulative leader, his teachings were a gateway for sexual exploitation, and members were subject to various powerplays by him and other leading members: see, for example, Victor Hawley’s (1843–1893) dairy, or Tirzah Miller’s (1843–1902) memoir, both published and discussed by Robert S. Fogarty under the titles Special Love/Special Sex ( 1994 ), and Desire and Duty at Oneida ( 2000 ), respectively. On the other hand, Oneida granted all members the right to refuse sexual advances, had men and women participate in its communal industry, propagated birth control via male continence, organized childcare communally and emphasized adult education. I recommend the useful compilation of primary materials Free Love in Utopia: John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community ( 2001 ) by George Noyes and Lawrence Foster. Of course, interested readers should also consider John Humphrey Noyes’s own writings.

Ahmad, Dohra. 2009. Landscapes of Hope. Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . London: Verso.

Google Scholar  

Atwood, Margaret. [1986] 2010. The Handmaid’s Tale . London: Vintage Classic.

Bacon, Francis. 1627. New Atlantis . London: J[ohn] H[aviland] for W. Lee.

Balasopoulos, Antonis. 2004. Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism. Utopian Studies 15 (2): 3–35.

Barlowe, Arthur. 1584. The First Voyage to Roanoke. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/barlowe/menu.html . Accessed 28 June 2020.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1989. America . New York: Verso.

Bellamy, Edward. [1888] 2009. Looking Backward, 2000–1887 . New York: Signet Classics.

———. 1897. Equality . D. Appleton & Co.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1975. The Puritan Origins of the American Self . New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bestor, Arthur. [1950] 1970. Backwoods Utopias. The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663–1829 . 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bethel, Elizabeth Rauh. 1981. Promiseland. A Century of Life in a Negro Community . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Boal, Iain A., ed. 2012. West of Eden. Communes and Utopia in Northern California . Oakland: PM.

Bradley Lane, Mary E. [1880–1881] 2010. Mizora. A Prophecy . London: Dodo Press.

Cabet, Etienne. [1840] 2003. Travels in Icaria . Translated by Leslie J. Roberts, with an introduction by Robert Sutton. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Callenbach, Ernest. [1975] 2009. Ecotopia. The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston . New York: Bantam Books.

Castilho, Maria Teresa. 2006. Utopianism in The Scarlet Letter . In Nowhere Somewhere: Writing, Space and the Construction of Utopia , ed. José Eduardo Reis and Jorge Miguel Bastos da Silva, 109–117. Porto: Editora da Universidade do Porto.

Castro Varela, María do Mar, and Nikita Dhawan. 2006. Spatialising Resistance—Resisting Space: On Utopias and Heterotopias. In Nowhere Somewhere: Writing, Space and the Construction of Utopia , ed. José Eduardo Reis and Jorge Miguel Bastos da Silva, 237–250. Porto: Editora da Universidade do Porto.

Cavendish, Margaret. [1666] 1994. The Blazing World and Other Writings . Edited by Kate Lilley. London: Penguin.

Claeys, Gregory. 2017. Dystopia. A Natural History . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Collins, Suzanne. 2008–2010. The Hunger Games Trilogy . New York: Scholastic.

Crèvecoeur, Michel Guillaume Jean de [John Hector St. John de]. [1782] 1981. Letters from an American Farmer . Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Delany, Samuel R. [1976] 1996. Trouble on Triton. An Ambiguous Heterotopia . Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Deloria, Philip. 2002. Counterculture Indians and the New Age. In Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s , ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, 159–188. New York: Routledge.

Elliott, Robert C. [1970] 2013. The Shape of Utopia. Studies in a Literary Genre . Bern: Peter Lang.

Ely, Melvin Patrick. 2005. Israel on the Appomattox. A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War . New York: Vintage.

Engels, Friedrich. [1877] 1948. Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft . Berlin: Dietz.

Engler, Bernd, Joerg O. Fichte, and Oliver Scheiding. 2002. Transformations of Millennial Thought in America, 1630–1860. In Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Context; 1630–1860 , ed. Bernd Engler, Joerg O. Fichte, and Oliver Scheiding, vol. 15, 9–37. Trier: WVT.

Ferry, Wilbur Hugh, Michael Harrington, and Frank L. Keegan. 1965. Cacotopias and Utopias: A Conversation . Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Fitting, Peter. 1991. Utopias Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia. Utopian Studies 2 (1/2): 95–109.

———. 1998. The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson. Utopian Studies 9 (2): 8–17.

Fogarty, Robert S. 1994. Special Love/Special Sex. An Oneida Community Diary . Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

———. 2000. Desire and Duty at Oneida. Tirzah Miller’s Intimate Memoir . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Foucault, Michel. [1967] 1986. Of Other Spaces. Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27.

Franke, Anselm. 2013. Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside. In The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside , ed. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 12–18. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Giles, Fayette Stratton. 1893. Shadows Before; or, a Century Onward . New York: Humboldt.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1915. Herland. The Forerunner , 6.

Goddu, Teresa A. 1997. Gothic America. Narrative, History, and Nation . New York: Columbia University Press.

Guarneri, Carl J. 1991. The Utopian Alternative. Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

———. 1994. The Americanization of Utopia: Fourierism and the Dilemma of Utopian Dissent in the United States. Utopian Studies 5 (1): 72–88.

Hariot, Thomas. 1588. A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/hariot/menu.html . Accessed 28 June 2020.

Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hatzenberger, Antoine. 2003. Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia. Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8 (1): 119–128.

Hodge, Shirby T. 1915. The White Man’s Burden. A Satirical Forecast . Boston: The Gorham Press.

Hogan, Richard. 1985. The Frontier as Social Control. Theory and Society 14 (1): 35–51.

Article   Google Scholar  

Hopkins, Pauline E. [1903] 2009. Of One Blood or, The Hidden Self . Edited By Deborah E. McDowell. New York: Washington Square Press.

Hopkinson, Nalo. 2000. Midnight Robber. New York: Warner Books. 

Howells, William Dean. 1894. A Traveler from Altruria . New York: Harper and Brothers.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 2018. Barracoon. The Story of the Last Slave . New York: Amistad.

Hutchinson, Colin. 2008. Cult Fiction: “Good” and “Bad” Communities in the Contemporary American Novel. Journal of American Studies 24 (1): 35–50.

Hutcheon, Linda. 2013. Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox . Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Huxley, Aldous. [1932] 2004. Brave New World . London: Vintage.

Jablon, Madelyn. 1999. Black Metafiction. Self-Consciousness in African American Literature . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2004. The Politics of Utopia. New Left Review 25 (Jan.–Feb.): 35–54.

———. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions . New York: Verso.

Johns, Alessa. 2010. Feminism and Utopianism. In The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature , ed. Gregory Claeys, 174–199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Johnson, Edward A. 1904. Light Ahead for the Negro . New York: The Grafton Press.

Kadir, Djelal. 1992. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth. Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kelleter, Frank. 2002. Amerikanische Aufklärung. Sprachen der Rationalität im Zeitalter der Revolution . Paderborn: Schöningh.

Knapp, Jeffrey. 1994. An Empire Nowhere. England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Landsman, Ned. 2008. Migration and Settlement. In A Companion to Colonial America , ed. Daniel Vickers, 76–98. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Lewes, Darby. 1989. Gynotopia: A Checklist of Nineteenth-Century Utopias by American Women. Legacy 6 (2): 29–41.

Lewis, R.W.B. 1955. The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Locke, John. 1764. Two Treatises of Government . London: A. Millar et al.

Lupton, Thomas. 1580–81. Siquila. Too Good to be True . London: Henry Binneman.

Marx, Leo. [1964] 2000. The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miller, Timothy. 1998. The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America. 1900–1960 . Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

———. 2002a. The Historical Communal Roots of Ultraconservative Groups: Earlier American Communes That Have Helped Shape Today’s Far Right. In The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization , ed. Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw, 75–109. Walnut Creek: AltaMira.

———. 2002b. The Sixties Era Communes. In Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s , ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, 327–351. New York: Routledge.

More, Thomas. [1516] 1912. The Utopia . Translated by R. Robinson. New York: Macmillan Company.

Morton, Thomas. [1637] 1883. The New English Canaan . Boston: Prince Society.

Moylan, Tom. [1986] 2014. Demand the Impossible. Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination . Bern: Peter Lang.

Noyes, George Wallingford, and Lawrence Foster. 2001. Free Love in Utopia. John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community . Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Noyes, John Humphrey. [1870] 1966. Strange Cults and Utopias of 19th Century America . Original title: History of American Socialisms. New York, Dover Publications.

Orth, Michael. 1990. Reefs on the Right: Fascist Politics in Contemporary American Libertarian Utopias. Extrapolation 31 (4): 293–316.

Patton, Sadie Smathers. 1957. The Kingdom of the Happy Land . Las Vegas: Stephens Press.

Paul, Heike. 2014. The Myths That Made America. An Introduction to American Studies . Bielefeld: transcript.

Pease, William H., and Jane H. Pease. 1963. Black Utopia. Negro Communal Experiments in America . Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Pitzer, Donald E. 1997. Introduction. In America’s Communal Utopias , ed. Donald E. Pitzer, 3–13. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

———. 2013. Developmental Communalism into the Twenty-First Century. In The Communal Idea in the 21st Century , ed. Elierzer Ben-Rafael, Yaacov Oved, and Menachem Topel, 33–52. Leiden: Brill.

Pordzik, Ralph. 2001. The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia. A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures . Bern: Peter Lang.

Price, Charles, Donald Nonini, and Erich Fox Tree. 2008. Grounded Utopian Movements: Subjects of Neglect. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (1): 127–159.

Roberts, Brian Russell, and Michelle Stephens. 2013. Archipelagic Studies and the Caribbean. Journal of Transnational American Studies 5 (1): 1–20.

Roemer, Kenneth M. 1976. The Obsolete Necessity. America in Utopian Writings, 1888–1900 . Kent: Kent State University Press.

———. 1981. Defining American as Utopia. In America as Utopia , ed. Kenneth M. Roemer, 1–15. New York: B. Franklin.

Russ, Joanna. [1975] 2010. The Female Man . London: Gollancz.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. 2007. Utopianism and National Identity. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3 (2–3): 87–106.

———. 2010. Utopianism. A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2013. Theorizing Intentional Community in the Twenty-First Century. In The Communal Idea in the 21st Century , ed. Elierzer Ben-Rafael, Yaacov Oved, and Menachem Topel, 53–72. Leiden: Brill.

———, ed. 2016 and ongoing. Utopian Literature in English. An Annotated Bibliography from 1516 to the Present . The Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

———. 2020. African Americans and Utopia: Visions of a Better Life. Utopian Studies 31 (1): 23–96.

Sawallisch, Nele. 2016. Fugitive Borders. Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Century . Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Sayers, Daniel O. 2014. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People. The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp . Gainesville: University Press of Florida; Society for Historical Archaeology.

Scott, Sarah. [1762] 1995. A Description of Millennium Hall . Edited by Gary Kelly. Peterborough: Broadview.

Shakespeare, William. [1611] 2011. The Tempest . Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Arden.

Shammas, Carole. 2008. The Origins of Transatlantic Colonization. In A Companion to Colonial America , ed. Daniel Vickers, 25–43. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Shelby, Tommie, and Paul Gilroy. 2008. Cosmopolitanism, Blackness, and Utopia. Transition 98: 116–135.

Skinner, B.F. [1948] 2005. Walden Two . Indianapolis: Hackett.

Slotkin, Richard. [1973] 1996. Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 . New York: Harper Perennial.

Smith, Henry Nash. [1950] 1971. Virgin Land. The American West as Symbol and Myth . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places . Oxford: Blackwell.

Spencer, Edmund. [1590–1596] 1987. The Faerie Queene . Edited by Thomas P. Roche. London: Penguin.

Spencer, Robyn C. 2012. Communalism and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. In West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California , ed. Iain A. Boal, 92–121. Oakland: PM.

Stone, Janferie. 2012. Occupied Alcatraz: Native American Community and Activism. In West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California , ed. Iain A. Boal, 81–91. Oakland: PM.

Tally, Robert T., Jr. 2013. Utopia in the Age of Globalization. Space, Representation, and the World-System . London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Turner, Fred. 2013. The Politics of the Whole circa 1968—and Now. In The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside , ed. Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 43–48. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Van Bueren, Thad M., and Sarah A. Tarlow. 2006. The Interpretive Potential of Utopian Settlements. Historical Archaeology 40 (1): 1–5.

Vannini, Philipp, et al. 2009. Recontinentalizing Canada: Arctic Ice’s Liquid Modernity and the Imagining of a Canadian Archipelago. Island Studies Journal 4 (2): 121–138.

Verhoeven, Will. 2013. Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Veselá, Pavla. 2011. Neither Black Nor White: The Critical Utopias of Sutton E. Griggs and George S. Schuyler. Science Fiction Studies 38 (2): 270–287.

Vieira, Fátima. 2010. The Concept of Utopia. In The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature , ed. Gregory Claeys, 3–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Waugh, Patricia. 2003. Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction . London: Routledge.

Wegner, Phillip E. 2002. Imaginary Communities. Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wells, H.G. [1905] 1967. A Modern Utopia . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Williams, Raymond. [1980] 2005. Culture and Materialism. Selected Essays . London and New York: Verso.

Winthrop, John. [1630] 1838. A Modell of Christian Charity: Written on Board of the Arabella, On the Atlantic Ocean. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3 (7): 31–48.

Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 2000. America and the Utopian Dream. http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/utopia/index.html . Accessed 28 June 2020.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

Verena Adamik

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Verena Adamik .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Adamik, V. (2020). ‘That Excellent Perfection’: A Short History of Utopia. In: In Search of the Utopian States of America. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_2

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_2

Published : 02 December 2020

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-60278-9

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-60279-6

eBook Packages : History History (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essay Examples >
• Essays Topics >
• Essay on Law

Utopia Argumentative Essays Example

Type of paper: Argumentative Essay

Topic: Law , Community , Society , Nature , Life , Utopia , World , America

Words: 2500

Published: 03/05/2020

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

There are many societies all over the world that have created different programs and paths that they set out to follow in the quest for a more peaceful society. The peace that the societies search for may differ from one society to another. However, these societies always have in mind the creation of a perfect place to live in where there are little or no problems where every member of the society lives in unending bliss. Many scholars have named this method of society creation as utopianism. Utopia emphasizes on different aspects of the society as the architects of the type of society always emphasize on the eradication of the ills and problems that cripple the formation of an ideal society. The ideal society is one that has the best environment created for the members of the said society to live in the best possible way that they could think of. Among the different societies that practiced different forms of utopia were the Shakers. The Shakers are a religious sect that started in the 18th Century and has been present in the country over the past years. The shakers are a group of Christians that sprung out of the protestant lot in the 18th Century when a few of the members defected and formed a society of their own. The society was known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. The society that was formed had different goals that it had in mind that were different from the activities that the other members of the protestant group had in mind. There were different expectations that the founders of the group expected from the protestant society that it did not find and therefore decided to leave the protestant group. Over time, the goals of the society were adjusted according to the opinions of the leaders as well as the information that the leaders claimed to have received from God in form of visions. All the activities were aimed at creating the best society that pleased God and that was free of the worldly problems that the leaders claimed to hinder the rest of the society from achieving the divine and complete society that they were looking to find. Among the goals that the Shakers society had in mind was that of true and complete repentance from all the members as the leader claimed that the second coming of Christ was imminent and that they had to be prepared for any outcome that resulted. The goal on repentance was put in place by the initial founders of the society back in the England where it was formed. Ann Lee, who was later known as Mother Ann Lee, brought about new goals for the society of Shakers. She claimed to have received a vision from God. In this vision, she saw that the fall of Adam and Eve was the main topic and the relationship between the fall of Adam and Eve to sexual intercourse. She therefore deigned rules that emphasized on sexual purity among the members of the Shakers society. The followers were required to leave their sinful nature, repent, give up worldly possessions as well as take up the duty of remaining celibate. She encouraged her members to give up on marriage and remain in the society. The Shaker group was originally members of the Quakers religious society that was present in England in the 18th century. They were members of the Quakers society until 1747 when Jane and James Wardley decided to exit the group and form another one of their own. The name ‘Shakers’ was given to them due to the methods of worship that they used. The methods used involved a lot of shouting, shaking and singing in tongues. In the American context, the Shaking Quakers was started by Ann Lee and fellow worshippers who had travelled from England to the colonial America. She claimed to be receiving visions from God that helped her manage the group. She developed a system of theology of which the members were to follow. Celibacy was a great principle in the community as developed by Ann Lee. After the death of Ann, the society was taken up by Elder Joseph Meacham and Eldress Lucy Wright. Together, they developed a plan of how the Shaker society would be like. The new pattern of the social organization described the society as one having celibate villages of men and women where they held all things in common. The first Shaker community that had been formed retained the leadership of the rest of the other communities that were formed. The Shaker society grew with time and spread to other states in the United States. Even though there were severally persecuted because of their somehow bizarre beliefs, the society was able to gather more and more followers and grew in numbers. There are several things to consider in the setting up of a Utopian society. There are several subdivisions of the society that would prove to be hard to establish utopia in them. Utopia is very possible. There are several things that prove that a utopian society would be possible in the current world. The Shakers society for instance proved that the communism way of life was possible and that the members of the society would still remain faithful and satisfied. The Shakers society was particularly active in the invention of several items that were important in the development of the science and technology in the 18th Century. They were also active in the packaging and marketing of seeds and also the production of medicinal herbs. However, in my opinion, creating a utopia society is very hard. The creation of a religious utopia may be easy. However, other aspects such as the creation of an economic utopia might be hard. There are people who are made to believe that capitalism is always superior to communism. They hold out that the rate of input of energy in capital creation varies greatly and feeding the people equally will create an unjust society. There are people who will take advantage of utopia and offer less in the society deliberately. The creation of a technological utopia may prove to be a hard nut to crack. Technological progress in a society shows how different the people of a certain society may be different. Different inventions will collide and uniting different people to one course may be very difficult. Utopia is not the preferred method of living among the different societies that are present in the world. There are different reasons that make this claim real. The methods that a utopian society uses together with the different principles that are employed in the creation of a utopian society may make the lives of people more miserable than the situation when the utopian society is not applied. The creation of a complete utopian society requires several measures met. These measures are used to adjust the living that the people are used to so as to create a society where are little differences between the members. The first reason why a utopian society is not preferred is that; human beings are very diverse in characteristics and this requires the creation of a council or government that would ensure that the society remain at peace and that no one absconds the duties that have been assigned to him. The creation of this type of government in a utopian society would lead the society to the problems that the utopian society will be running away from. The creation of a utopian society will include the eradication of some of the natural principles of life in the creation of a much ‘better’ life. For instance, taking an example of the Shakers society, they took celibacy as a need for the whole society. Celibacy defies the natural rules that are meant to ensure the growth of future generations from the current population. Apart from the religious utopia, the creation of a technological utopia will hinder the invention of different independent technological breakthrough. The main reason behind this is that, there are rules that are set in the creation of a utopian society. These rules are created in a way to help the society present to remain under one course. The current world has developed to the state it is mostly due to economic competition. When there are economic competitions, economies and countries create policies and programs that are meant to meet the target that they set for themselves. The creation of a utopian society will eradicate the competition that exists between the different societies. The eradication of competition removes the urgency to improve the level of development in the different communities and countries at large. Economic utopia therefore will not champion the creation of a better world but will rather make the people live in lower level of development as well as poor welfare. The creation of communism in the utopian societies means that the members if the said society engage in communal search of capital. The communal search of capital however, will not be just to everyone as there are different areas of work where some people will offer more energy into capital creation. The energy that different people apply to the society will be depended on the skill that the particular person has. The returns are not fair either. In most cases, people will receive equal treatment irrespective of the effort offered in the society.

Research on Utopia in the USA’s Perspective

The Americans have had different views on the possibility of having utopia in their country and the whole world at large. The historical research technique will help us realize the possible answer to the question on whether it is possible for the American society to develop a utopian society and whether the same can be replicated to the rest of the world. Here, the research question is; do the Americans believe that a utopian society can be achieved in the modern era to their country or even the world at large? The main hypothesis here is that; the Americans do not believe that the country could one day achieve a utopian society and the world too cannot achieve a utopian state.

The scope of the research

The research examines the different applications of the utopian society and the outcomes of the society in different parts of the world over the different centuries. There are societies that applied the utopian principles as well as countries over the few past centuries of recorded history. There are religious sects that practiced utopia as well as countries and societies that were not religious based that applied several principles of the creation of utopian societies. There are different communities that have practiced utopia in the different centuries and the results of the practices have been differing from one society to the other. The research analyses a few of the societies that practiced utopia as well as the different results achieved. In the ancient America, several societies practiced utopia basing their principles on different aspects of life at that moment. The Brook Farm was present between the years of 1841 to 1846. The philosophical movement was present in the country in a period where there were tens of utopian movements. The movement stood out of the rest due to its nature of being secular. The movement was created to bring farmers to work together and then share the fruits together. The movement did not last long though. Internal squabbles were the chief reason it lasted for only a couple of years. The Fruitlands movement existed between 1843 and 1844. The Fruitlands movement was formed by Charles Lane and Bronson Alcott. The founders insisted on forbidding eating certain food types, celibacy between married members as well as limiting the use of animal labor. The movement lasted less than seven months as members defected due to the conditions that they were subjected to. The New Harmony existed between 1825 and 1829. The movement was a settlement that was created to help the members pursue the study of sciences and natural philosophy without the embrace of the modern capitalist life. The movement was successful in the creation of a center where many young promising scientists were united. The movement collapsed after four years due to wrangles arising from differing opinions about the use of money. The Oneida was present between 1848 and 1881 in upstate New York. The movement was largely defined by complex marriage rules to the members. Monogamy in the society was thoroughly rejected and many members had to follow certain rules devised by a special committee if at all they were to have children. The mothers were only allowed to take care of the children for a number of years after which the community assumed responsibility of the older children. The Shakers society was notably present in several states and was particularly known through the settlements that were created for the members who were to follow thorough celibacy rules. There was also communal ownership of goods between the members. The movement weakened in the 20th Century and the remaining settlements have been turned into museums. The analysis of the few sampled utopian societies shows that the utopian organizations have not been particularly stable in the historical America. Most of them suffered internal problems that arose mostly due to the nature of the rules that the members were subjected to. A large percentage of the utopian organizations survived only a few years after which the organizations crashed. Leadership wrangles were also present in most of the organizations that practiced utopia. The modern society is still faced with the same problems that were present during the historical America. The modern society would require a lot of effort in the creation of a utopian society among them. The nature of variations between the members of the present society poses a great threat to the creation of the complete utopian society.

Beaumont, M. (2005). Utopia ltd: Ideologies of social dreaming in England, 1870-1900. Leiden: Brill. Castañeda, J. G. (1993). Utopia unarmed: The Latin American left after the Cold War. New York: Knopf. Mannheim, K., Wirth, L., & Shils, E. (2001). Ideology and utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., ltd. Shakers (1815). A declaration of the society of people, commonly called Shakers: Shewing their reasons for refusing to aid or abet the cause of war and bloodshed, by bearing arms, paying fines, hiring substitutes, or rendering any equivalent for military services. Hartford [Conn.: Printed by Hudson and Goodwin. Sreenivasan, J. (2008). Utopias in American history. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, Inc. Stanley, W. B. (2002). Curriculum for Utopia: Social reconstructionism and critical pedagogy in the postmodern era. Albany: State University of New York Press. Thompson, B. (2004). Devastating Eden: The search for Utopia in America. London: HarperCollins.

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 1718

This paper is created by writer with

ID 281174382

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Body dissertation chapters, interview dissertation chapters, classroom dissertation chapters, staff dissertation chapters, age dissertation chapters, system dissertation chapters, relation dissertation chapters, ability dissertation chapters, validity dissertation chapters, gain dissertation chapters, environmental conservation college essays, baroque versus rococo historical art period essay samples, good case study about diversity management in addressing racial prejudice, education in colleges article review sample, free research paper on swot analysis of the chipotle grill, good research paper about managerial marketing, major changes in political structures social and economic life occurred during essays example, example of history essay 6, good essay about access to schools in afghanistan, example of essay on what happened to those who went to johannesburg to visit and those who went to stay, good example of global warming is eroding glacial ice a summary essay, free ecofeminism article review example, free critical thinking about 10 year plan 8 life objective, good example of tartuffe essay, persuasive message revised version essays examples, good example of educational background research paper, example of british invasion essay, good essay about explanatory synthesis, free essay on presidential character, solar panels essay example, miscegenation laws race and marriage essays examples, good example of literature review on observational study design, sample term paper on quality of service in virtual private ip networks, u s mexican american war essay example, imhotep essays, flower hill essays, dartagnan essays, jim jones essays, gus van sant essays, larose essays, michel hazanavicius essays, grace hopper essays, marcel mauss essays.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Raphael Hythloday’s Ideas in Thomas More’s “Utopia” Essay

Identify and explain precisely the most important points and arguments raphael hythloday presents in book one and book two.

Raphael Hythloday in Book “ Utopia,” discusses the probable chance of having an ideal world where societies work for the gain and benefit of each other. According to the scholar, resources and opportunities should be for communities and not private people; the scholar felt that private ownership of property is the main hindrance to the attainment of a utopian world.

Raphael Hythloday, in books one and two was of the view that the government and the state operate within an economy for the benefit of the societies, they are given power and authority to dictate the distribution of resources among communities. The writer feels that the nature of human beings is likely to exploit and accumulate wealth for themselves at the expense of others; the government should be the sole owner of property and people taken as laborers at the same level. The writer argues that if this were the angle taken then the world would be utopian.

A culture of a country determines the value and ideologies they hold; when the government assumes the role of controlling the economy then people are likely to accept the culture and solve differences in culture and social rivalry among them. He noted the role that domestic laws play in creating an equal society in legislative matters; he observes that the breakthrough got us only possible since the government has taken the ownership of constitutional power. The approach with law gives him the arguing point of why the same cannot be implemented across the board.

According to Raphael Hythloday, the government should take the central role of activities in their countries; the underlying ideology is the distribution of wealth. They aim at having equal distribution of wealth and do not recognize individual wealth accumulation. From this angle, it is a good approach aimed at ensuring that the national cake is shared among the entire population. There are no classes and the government is seen to choose the direction that the masses will go.

Sometimes, and it has happened most often, the actors in the government make some decisions for their interests. They may look at the interest of a few at the expense of the masses. Production is seen as not geared to profit-making and thus the adopted methods of production are in most cases, not the most efficient. The inefficiency limits the level of economy in the country; in this era of limited resources, these systems are not good for a country more so in the developing and less developed countries. They are meant to encourage a vicious cycle of poverty (More and Clarence 1-3)

Explain in detail why you agree with Hythloday or side with Thomas More

Thomas More has criticized the concerns brought about by Raphael Hythloday; he thinks that the world cannot attain utopianism with centralized control of resources. Thomas More supports the idea of a capitalist system of governance. The system does not limit the citizens to the amount of wealth that they can accumulate and gives them a level playing ground for wealth creation. Business in all sectors of the economy is enhanced; however, the economy creates a high competition in resources as people seek to win the limited resources, the result is some people gaining at the expense of others.

As much as the system by Thomas More can be seen in, some economies like China and the United States, some vices are seen to be associated with the system; the system encourages selfishness that results in corruption, secondly, the distribution of wealth is not uniform and the economy can favor small groups. Class (that is measured by how much one has) influences major decisions in these countries. It is common to get a large part of the population poor and resources centered on a small group.

Raphael Hythloday’s approach to the attainment of a utopian society is sound with a limited population growth rate and countries that have abundant resources, however the situation on the ground is different, resources are limited and need to be optimally utilized; this cannot be possible with Raphael Hythloday approach.

In 2011, if it were “possible,” would you base a society on Utopian ideals? Yes? No?

If it was possible to have a utopian world, then the world will be a better place to live in, people would be able to respect and value others despite their minor differences. Some international and national rivalries have been blamed on differences in power and resource distribution; with a utopian world, then such rivalries would be unheard of.

Some dangers can arise with a utopian economy; the system of production works with landowners and laborers, when utopianism has been attained, then the world would suffer from a lack of laborers and when available, the wage rate would be high. This leads to under and inefficient exploitation of natural resources; when resources are not effectively utilized, then the world will suffer a lack of essential comedies and deterioration of living standards (More and Clarence 23).

In my view, modern economies should have a hybrid governance system where the government intervenes in its country’s economic management but allows the private sector to drive the economy. The government should intervene to facilitate an appropriate economic growth rate and protect citizens from violation of their constitutional rights. Before making an investment decision, the government should consider the economic, political, social, global, and environmental implications of such a decision.

Works Cited

More, Thomas, and Clarence Miller . Utopia. New York: Yale Univ. Press, 2001. Print.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, December 28). Raphael Hythloday's Ideas in Thomas More's "Utopia". https://ivypanda.com/essays/raphael-hythlodays-ideas-in-thomas-mores-utopia/

"Raphael Hythloday's Ideas in Thomas More's "Utopia"." IvyPanda , 28 Dec. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/raphael-hythlodays-ideas-in-thomas-mores-utopia/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Raphael Hythloday's Ideas in Thomas More's "Utopia"'. 28 December.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Raphael Hythloday's Ideas in Thomas More's "Utopia"." December 28, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/raphael-hythlodays-ideas-in-thomas-mores-utopia/.

1. IvyPanda . "Raphael Hythloday's Ideas in Thomas More's "Utopia"." December 28, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/raphael-hythlodays-ideas-in-thomas-mores-utopia/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Raphael Hythloday's Ideas in Thomas More's "Utopia"." December 28, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/raphael-hythlodays-ideas-in-thomas-mores-utopia/.

• Renaissance Period Authors and Literature
• Utopian Societies Depicted by Sir Thomas More
• Literary Utopia vs. Utopianism – How Do They Differ?
• “Utopia” by Thomas More and the Human Pursuit of an Ideal Life
• 1984 by George Orwell
• “The Best State of a Republic and the New Island Utopia” by Sir Thomas Moore
• Raphael: A Renaissance Master
• Commonwealth in "Utopia" by Thomas More
• Raphael and His Study of the “Madonna of the Meadow”
• Classical Utopian Thought: "Utopia" by Thomas More
• Vocation in Plato's "Apology" and Dostoyevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor"
• Absurdity in Kafka's “The Trial” and Camus' “The Stranger”
• Mahatma Gandhi: What One Should Know
• The Analysis of the passage from Sartre’s Nausea
• The Individual, Faith, and Society

• Entertainment
• Environment
• Information Science and Technology
• Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Literature The Giver

The Dichotomy of Dystopian and Utopian Societies in "The Giver"

*minimum deadline

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below

• Angela's Ashes
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• My Sister`s Keeper
• Animal Farm
• What They Fought For

Related Essays

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

Stanford Humanities Today

Arcade: a digital salon.

My focus on “utopian” as a case study for the scope of critical semantics might at first seem surprising, since the project Roland Greene outlines in Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes rejects “canonical” terms to focus on “words of an everyday character” (14, 13). [ 1 ] These words, Greene demonstrates, “are not the most ordinary,” but despite primarily being “important within local fields of knowledge such as rhetoric or political theory, [they] tend to appear in general discourse as though they were ordinary, their capaciousness taken for granted” (13, 14). As we may recognize, the word “utopian” fits in only awkwardly within this framework. Along with its famous lexical neighbor, “utopia”, it has certainly not escaped the attention of readers, both early modern and modern. Yet, this “not the most ordinary” of words does seem to be—or at least become—of “everyday character” within the century it was coined; unlike the original examples of Five Words (language, blood, world, invention, and resistance), the term “utopian” originated in the sixteenth century itself. It thus seems primed to mobilize the project of critical semantics in new ways, as it provides us a glimpse of the extravagant capacities of recent words that are (in theory) free from, or at least less burdened by, past linguistic associations.

The term “utopian” originally denoted specific things: as a noun, it referred to inhabitants of Thomas More’s Utopia (“the utopians”), and as an adjective it described the nature of this fictional place (“the utopian commonwealth”). But over the course of the century it became ubiquitous in different forms of writing and came to refer to varied entities—including kinds of people, cognitive formulations, and imaginative states. Its liminal status—simultaneously “everyday” and “canonical”—enables us to test the bounds of which words might escape our purview if we do not focus on their “ordinary” nature despite their canonicity in our critical discourse. In this essay, I explore how “utopian” was an extraordinary word that became ordinary, a particular term that became general, and a reference to a physical place that became an idea. As such, the notion of “change” that lies at the “foreground of [Greene’s] argument” (8) about critical semantics is vital to understanding the capaciousness of “utopian”, making it ideal to think with about how words at the threshold of canonicity and ordinariness can expand the scope of the project.

I’ll begin by focusing on the ways in which “utopian” aligns with the project of critical semantics, which explores “words that early modern people not only thought through but lived with” (5). We see such vibrancy in the usages of “utopian”. Unsurprisingly, it is an adjective that describes particulars of Thomas More’s text. Ralph Robinson’s 1551 translation discusses “This boke of ye vtopian commen wealth,” and in the second edition of the translation (1556), the “Printer to the Reader” mentions “The Vtopian Alphabete.” [ 2 ] But its usage became much more expansive within a few decades, as writers across varied disciplines applied it in diverse contexts. Robert Burton writes in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that “Vtopian parity is a thing to be wished for rather then effected,” and John Milton declares in his challenge to censorship and licensing, Areopagitica (1644), that “to sequester out of the world into Atlantick and Eutopian polities which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain wisely as in this world of evill, in the midd’st whereof God hath plac’t us unavoidably.” [ 3 ] These examples signal the word’s migration from its initial reference to a particular place to a general idea—an idea that often carried negative connotations of impracticality and impossibility, whether in an unachievable “Vtopian parity” or as inaccessible “Eutopian polities.” Even when not used negatively, it denoted impractical, idealistic, or unrealistic beliefs about society’s perfectibility. For example, John Donne uses it to describe purity or inexperience (“To Sir Henry Wotton” (1633)):

if men, which in these places live, Durst look in themselves, and themselves retrieve, They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then Utopian youth grown old Italian (43-46).

And in another instance, Samuel Purchas uses it to describe a general ideal place ( Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613)): “no Vtopian State comparable to theirs.” [ 4 ] These examples demonstrate how, losing its rootedness in the specific island of Utopia, “ utopian” becomes omnipresent as a concept of unreality, impracticality, and even impossibility for a wide range of early modern writers.

These qualities also hint at the word’s fit with another goal of critical semantics: to consider terms that run across languages, eras, disciplines, and genres. “Utopian” is definitionally transcultural. Derived from the Greek word ou-topos (no-place), but also punning on eu-topos (good place), the nonexistence or the ideality of the word is graspable only in translation. These dual cross-linguistic connotations drive the humor in More’s Utopia on the topic of the perfect island’s unlocatability, as the author’s humanist interlocutors across Europe construct elaborate paratextual materials to bolster the idea that this place actually exists. But the question of existence—or we might say the certainty of its non-existence—was not a laughing matter; it becomes a serious point of distinction for travel-writers who established the realities of their discovered realms by distinguishing them from Utopia’s fictionality and its no-placeness. As Humphrey Gilbert writes in Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (1576), “ YOV might iustly haue charged mee with an vnsetled head if I had at any time taken in hand, to discouer Vtopia , or any countrey fained by imagination: But Cataia is none such, it is a countrey, well knowen to be described and set foorth by all moderne Geographers. ” [ 5 ] Gilbert reverses the central tenet of More’s text, relying on the idea that his readers are universally in agreement about Utopia being a “countrey fained by imagination.”

“Utopian” thus crosses disciplines and genres, like the five words that Greene uses to demonstrate the work of critical semantics. It spills over from fiction to travel-writing to political tracts, and even to proto-scientific ventures. For instance, in England, Samuel Hartlib’s network of reformers relied on utopian models to propose improvements in agriculture, education, and natural philosophy. The Hartlib circle’s ideas reflect the term’s aspirational quality (its ideality, we might say), rather than its impracticality. Here, “utopian” refers to achievable improvements. Contrary to the dismissive tone adopted by travel writers, the word signifies future opportunities for Hartlibian reformers who use it to outline visions or plans of proposed projects in England, Ireland, and even the New World. [ 6 ] Perhaps their embrace of the ethos of utopian projects underscores the extreme oscillations between reality and fiction that are latent in the term itself—rather than stress the differences between the two, Hartlibians suggest that the conditions they observe in their extant societies can be molded into the utopian domains that so far only exist in their imaginations. In this formulation, utopian endeavors seem to represent not a difference in kind from actuality but a difference in degree. Reaching the fictional ideal becomes the goal in the actual world, and it is only a matter of time before the two realms converge.

These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century applications of the term already gesture to how “utopian” aligns with perhaps what we might consider the key methodological feature of critical semantics. The project “name[s] words” not only in terms of “semantic integers that one finds in a dictionary” but also through the “concepts that shadow them” (3-4). It looks for “models for semantic change” (8) to track words through “conceits…[that] are native to the long sixteenth century” (10). It can be productive to consider the ambivalent significations of “utopian” under this rubric. I propose the conceptual “shadow” of “utopian” is “hypothetical,” another term with a rich scope in early modern discourse. The word “hypothetical” was associated with conjecture, speculation, even fanciful suppositions, and its usage ranged across disciplines, from astronomy (as we see in the writings of Copernicus) to logic (see, for instance, Abraham Fraunce Lawiers Logike , 1588) to experimental philosophy (see Robert Hooke’s Micrographia , 1665). [ 7 ] Long sixteenth-century thinkers commonly understood the term as suppositional, or as “something supposed or assumed to be true without proof or conclusive evidence.” [ 8 ] In an era of increasing attention to empiricism and experiment, this tie with supposition could have negative connotations, and a hypothesis could be dismissed as “A groundless or insufficiently grounded supposition”—a dismissal starkly similar to those leveled against utopian endeavors. [ 9 ] I wish to suggest that the term “utopian” offers early moderns a hypothetical way of approaching the world: as conjectures, speculations, and suppositions about what could be. In other words, the idea of the “hypothetical” did not only designate for early modern thinkers a method for interpreting the world. It also captured a state of being that was repeatedly ascribed to utopian realms: as-yet-unproved ways of existence that could be dismissed as impractical goals or celebrated as aspirational ideals. Thus, if we fully connect the conceit to our word of choice, we could say that utopian embodies a hypothetical ontology; it emerged as a concept of non-existence. The resonances between the flexible, cross-disciplinary applications of “hypothetical” and “utopian” illuminate why, for early modern thinkers, the latter term could transform from an extra-ordinary word associated with a specific fictional place into an idea or a notion of speculation, conjecture, or idealization. Such varied usages of “utopian” solidify its status as a capacious concept that structured crucial intellectual and philosophical questions of the time on epistemology, truth, and ontology.

As we can observe, “utopian” is a perfect candidate in our search of new transcultural keywords. It is the ambivalence of the term—like that of the original Five Words —that animates its varied applications. The word bolsters the idea that conceits drive the work of critical semantics. It also underscores that if Five Words outlines a “keywords” project, its objects of study are conceptual keywords. But how might such new keywords function not only as mere examples of critical semantics as it exists, but also as intellectual instruments that put pressure on—and can thereby broaden—the project’s central claims and methodology? Greene already embeds such a question in the “Introduction” to Five Words. He concludes this chapter by highlighting the problem of method: “I really do not know that the project of Five Words can be done” (14). This uncertainty about outcome is of course, an invitation, not only to test this “resolutely elemental approach” that operates at the “cellular level” (3) (by thinking through words rather than through historical events, authors, or works), but also to examine the scope of the project itself. In this spirit, I’ll conclude by gesturing to the ways in which “utopian” not only underscores the conceptual (conceit-based, perhaps metaphorical) foundation of critical semantics, but also how it intimates the project’s expandability.

Like the initial Five Words , “utopian” functions as a “vesse[l] of change” (173): even though it emerges from a work of fiction, and even though it sometimes operates as a metonym for fictionality itself, its greater efficacy lies in continually putting pressure on the bounds between reality and fiction. For our purposes, “utopian” highlights that the changes we trace through “shadow” concepts or “conceits,” are latent in keywords themselves. In other words, we must think of “utopian” as a word-concept, rather than treating the two parts of this hyphenated term as separate or suggesting that one precedes the other. I say this because it is utopian’s cross-linguistic playfulness with ideas—and specifically with the duality of no-placeness and ideality—that motivates users to test, expand, even mock the bounds between truth and falsehood. Notions of conjecture, unfeasibility, and ideals undergird the word. It is by applying the central methodological feature of critical semantics that we fully grasp this complexity; its conceptual shadow (of hypothetical) enables us to fully recognize how “ utopian” becomes an ordinary word that circulates, and finally comes to stand in for, these underlying notions. This brief exploration also reveals that the term—ubiquitous in twenty-first century discourse as a referent to a generic ideal society or idea, and as a word that has been completely stripped from its particular links to More’s humanist text and context—was shifting gears from the particular to the general almost immediately after its invention. Users in the long sixteenth century were deploying it just as extravagantly and loosely (or generously, we might say) as we do today. Thus, as “utopian”, within a century of its conception, comes to refer to ideas as well as people and places, and as it oscillates between noun and adjective, it raises questions that take us beyond those raised by the original Five Words : How do words become ordinary? How (and how soon) does the shift between particulars and generals occur? How might adjectives, or for that matter other grammatical constructs, reshape a project that originally focused on nouns? What would it mean to expand critical semantics beyond the long sixteenth century (the temporal limitation set in Five Words ), given that there might be similarities in early modern and modern evolutions of certain terms? Such questions suggest that it is not only movements across languages, disciplines, and genres, but also change across time that is vital to the project. They also highlight how the processes of transformation, rather than final meanings, are important in understanding these keywords. Ultimately, as we turn to conceits to uncover ideas underlying a word, and as we recognize the ways in which early moderns “lived with” diverse undertones of a word that now seems “canonical” to us, we also discover how transcultural keywords were themselves concepts in potentia .

I would like to thank Tara Lyons and Vin Nardizzi for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

[1] Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2013). All citations to the book are by page number.

[ 2 ] Thomas More, A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia. Trans. Ralph Robinson (London, 1551); Thomas More, A frutefull pleasaunt, [and] wittie worke, of the beste state of a publique weale, and of the newe yle, called Vtopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, 2 nd ed. (London, 1556).

[ 3 ] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621); John Milton, Areopagitica; a speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of vnlicens'd printing, to the Parlament of England (London, 1644).

[ 4 ] John Donne, Poems (London, 1633); Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimage; or, Relations of the world and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered (London, 1613).

[ 5 ] Humphrey Gilbert, Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (London, 1576).

[ 6 ] For the classic study on this topic, see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660 2nd ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). I am referring to the ethos and language of texts such as Gabriel Platt’s A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641) and William Petty’s The advice of W.P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib. For the advancement of some particular parts of learning (1648).

[ 7 ] See for instance, Andreas Osiander’s anonymous Preface to Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Nuremberg, 1543). Osiander declares the heliocentric theory to be a hypothesis that was used for calculations, or to “save appearances,” rather than demonstrating actual conditions of the universe. Abraham Fraunce, in The lawiers logike (London, 1588) writes “The woorde, hypotheticall, which is héere commonly vsed, is neither proper nor fit for this purpose. For, in absolute copulatiue and discretiue axiomes, there is no ὑπόθεσις, no condition at all.” In Micrographia (London, 1665), Robert Hooke discusses “The hypothetical height and density of the Air.”

[ 8 ] In this section, I draw on the OED definitions of the related terms “hypothesis” and “hypothetical” to trace their varied meanings in the early modern period. See “hypothetical, adj. and n.”. OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. (accessed December 10, 2017) and “hypothesis, n.”. OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. (accessed May 29, 2018).

[ 9 ] See “hypothesis, n.”. OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. (accessed May 29, 2018).

Join the colloquy

Critical Semantics: New Transnational Keywords

Anston Bosman

This Colloquy arises from a 2018 MLA Convention session I organized on behalf of the Forum on Comparative Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. The original call for papers read simply: "Extend and critique Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes , Roland Greene's 2013 reorientation of early modern studies. What does Greene miss?

Craft a 'lightning talk' using one new keyword." As session organizer, I received a bumper crop of submissions, each passionately advocating for its own concept. Several papers extended Five Words in surprising ways, but only a handful took the further step of directly engaging Greene’s innovative "critical semantics" as a practice or method. Four of those composed the panel in New York City, and Roland Greene agreed to offer each of them a formal response. The resulting conversation brought diverse approaches to bear on a single focused intent: the deployment of philological skill to capture the flow and entanglement of ideas across European cultures. Although rooted in early modern studies, each contribution was quickened by twenty-first-century urgency, mobilizing critical semantics as an archaeology of what Arjun Appadurai would call transnational ideoscapes (1996: 36-37). The four papers and Greene’s response yielded powerful questions that overflowed our conference timeslot, and as audience members—including many whose excellent proposals I had been unable to include—expressed their admiration for the format as well as the speakers, it became clear that publication was warranted. We thank ARCADE for hosting this Colloquy as the next step in our conversation.

Our topic is timely, because we live in an age of keywords. They structure our research, our publications, and our teaching. From EEBO to Google n-grams, the keyword search has become a modern equivalent of dipping a pen into ink, where, as the nursery rhyme goes, "some find the thoughts they want to think." Humanists have learned from, or perhaps bowed to, scientific ways of mapping knowledge by digitally analyzing the strength and pattern of meaningful terms, which engineers call "keyword co-occurrence networks." When we submit abstracts for conferences or journals or course catalogues, keywords must be provided; indeed, for this Colloquy’s original panel the MLA program required five keywords—why must it be five?—that were not Roland Greene’s words or the titles of our presentations. But keywords today are not confined to bureaucratic subtexts. On the contrary, they increasingly structure the titles of scholarly lectures, articles, and monographs. Literary titles, which used to trade in riddling questions or ambiguous genitives, now unspool as paratactic lists: consider the examples of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2005), and Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015). How starkly the listed terms differ from the neologisms of high theory! In fact, almost all the diction in these titles belongs to what Raymond Williams in 1976 called "a general vocabulary ranging from strong, difficult and persuasive words in everyday usage to words which, beginning in particular specialized contexts, have become quite common in descriptions of wider areas of thought and experience" (2014: xxvii). After all, the title of Keywords itself derives from a household object, no less important for being used every day.

For an object that is continually being declared obsolete, the physical key has proved astonishingly resilient. (Although smartphones can now unlock your house or car, Google has signaled the limits of virtuality by manufacturing a low-tech security key that physically authenticates users, supposedly reassuring them that their data is safe from hackers.) Yet the key’s stubborn materiality contrasts with the abstraction that some of Williams’s successors emphasize in their modern anthologies of keywords. A striking example is Keywords for Today , a 2018 volume produced by an Anglo-American scholarly collective and edited by Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek. This text variously updates, replaces or adds new entries to Williams’s collection of complex words. For our purposes, the additions and subtractions are telling: gone, for example, is the entry on materialism , while the very first entry explores a new keyword, which is abstract . In line with this remarkable substitution, some entries call attention to how twenty-first-century vocabulary shrinks from its material base, such as the evolution of market into the "hardened abstraction" of the market , with its tyrannical definite article (2018: 231). Other entries, however, seem blind to their own abstraction, as when image skims over the physical consequences of socially mediated aesthetics as distorted by technology. By contrast with Keywords for Today , Greene’s Five Words elaborates its critical semantics "by trying to make tangible what is often abstract and obscure" (2013: 8), offering literal analogues to its polysemous terms (the palimpsest for invention , the pendent for language , and so forth) in order to underscore the dynamic relay between the material and the discursive in early modern cultures.

Greene blazes two further pathways unfamiliar to modern literary taxonomists. The first is historical . By slowing the brisk diachronic sweep of keyword etymologies down to the Renaissance and Baroque, Greene tunes in to subtler rhythmic patterns, finding in the so-called "discovery of language in early modern Europe" not only new words but new relations between them: thus terms like tongue and language are described as "neither dependent on nor independent of one another," but instead "pendent" or reciprocally clarifying and energizing (53). Elsewhere, Greene catches terms in mid-transformation, charting how blood is redefined by the "literalism of the sixteenth century" and the "vitalism of the mid-seventeenth" (115). The other pathway is comparative . Williams long ago noted that "many of the most important keywords … either developed key meanings in languages other than English, or went through a complicated and interactive development in a number of major languages," but predicted that the necessary "comparative analysis" would require an "international collaborative enterprise" (2014: xxxi). The difficulty of such work is evident in the case of Keywords for Today , which explores only one term recognizably borrowed from beyond the Anglosphere—the Sanskrit karma , which is quite properly adduced to demonstrate "the danger of trying to limit English semantics to its traditional homelands" (2018: 207). Alert to such danger, in Five Words Greene has provided a single-authored study that boldly and succinctly takes up Williams’s internationalist challenge.

Or at least he has done so for the terms blood, invention, language, resistance, and world . "Many words," Greene writes, "are like these words," continuing: "I have envisioned extending this sort of project to every word on a given page by Rabelais, Sidney, or the Inca Garcilaso, distributing the terms to scholars with the injunction not only to explain their semantic changes over time but to set each discrete word in motion with the others" (2013: 14). Such is the gauntlet taken up by this ARCADE Colloquy. Each essay collected here is to double business bound: the authors have each chosen a single transcultural keyword from the early modern period, and they have set their keyword in motion with Five Words as well as cognate or "pendent" terms they find essential. The reader will observe that not all their words are nouns. Nor are their keywords all self-evidently "ordinary," and on occasion they explicitly put that descriptor under pressure. The contributors draw into the discussion features of early modern worlds that Five Words did not have the space to map, including visual culture (John Casey’s color ), radical politics (Crystal Bartolovich’s common ), the poetics of ecology (Vin Nardizzi’s grafting ), and the philosophy of science (Debapriya Sarkar’s utopian ). Far from some rote parataxis, however, these keywords allow the reader to adapt Greene’s tools for ever deeper exploration. On its publication, Five Words was lauded no less for its stylistic elegance than for its conceptual ambition. Bookended by that study and Greene’s generous response to the four initial essays, this Colloquy probes new interventions in literary studies and rewards the reader with unexpected results.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Greene, Roland. 2013. Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MacCabe, Colin and Holly Yanacek, eds. 2018. Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, Raymond. (1976) 2014.   Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

View the discussion thread.

What are My Colloquies?

My Colloquies are shareables: Curate personal collections of blog posts, book chapters, videos, and journal articles and share them with colleagues, students, and friends.

My Colloquies are open-ended: Develop a Colloquy into a course reader, use a Colloquy as a research guide, or invite participants to join you in a conversation around a Colloquy topic.

My Colloquies are evolving: Once you have created a Colloquy, you can continue adding to it as you browse Arcade.

Discovering Humanities Research at Stanford

Stanford Humanities Center

Advancing Research in the Humanities

Humanities Research for a Digital Future

The Humanities in the World

• Interventions
• About the Journal
• Policy and Submissions
• Editorial Board
• Editorial Policy
• Submission Guidelines
• Executive Team
• Friends of Arcade

Live revision! Join us for our free exam revision livestreams Watch now →

Reference Library

Collections

• See what's new
• All Resources
• Student Resources
• Assessment Resources
• Teaching Resources
• CPD Courses
• Livestreams

Study notes, videos, interactive activities and more!

Politics news, insights and enrichment

Currated collections of free resources

Browse resources by topic

• All Politics Resources

Resource Selections

Currated lists of resources

Study Notes

Anarchism and Utopia

Last updated 26 May 2019

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share by Email

This ideal society rests on anarchism’s optimistic view that humankind’s capacity for development, and the creation of a harmonious natural social order, can be nurtured in the absence of the state. Almost every type of anarchist utopia is a decentralised society, based on free association and self-regulation, where people govern and organise themselves. For anarchists, this type of social arrangement maximises liberty, equality and solidarity.

Having said this, different strands of anarchism offer different visions of an ideal society. Collectivist anarchism, and anarcho-communists, call for a new utopian system that removes capitalism and the state, and introduces new social arrangements based on common ownership, mutual aid, economic equality and freely-formed 'natural' communities. These anarchists argue that human altruism can be nurtured only under such circumstances. Individualist anarchists advocate a utopian system that has no state and (unlike collectivist anarchists and anarcho-communists) no social or economic organisation. Moreover, anarcho-capitalists envisage a stateless society based on 'natural' unregulated economic competition, the pursuit of private property and a social balance created by competing individual interests.

Critics maintain that anarchism’s pursuit of the ideal society is utopian in a negative sense. From this perspective, anarchist aims are impractical, unrealistic and irrational. Anarchists, in short, delude themselves and others that a ‘fantasy’ society is both desirable and possible. The main objections to anarchist utopianism are set out below:

Objections to anarchist utopianism

Critics argue that anarchism has no unified utopian social vision. Although anarchists know what they are against, they cannot agree what they are for. In addition, no anarchist society has ever been formed, suggesting it is unachievable.

Conservatives maintain that anarchism has an overoptimistic view of human nature. For conservatives, humans are self-interested and flawed. Therefore, people have to be governed effectively and subjected to authority because, being selfish and competitive, they cannot be trusted to act responsibly or altruistically.

Both conservatives and liberals regard private property as a basic feature of human society. A key component of human nature is the drive to obtain and retain private property. Furthermore, liberals assert that private property is a fundamental right . Anarcho-capitalism endorses the view that the pursuit of property is natural.

Socialists object to anarchist utopianism for two reasons. First, socialists argue that the removal of the state will not achieve equality and common ownership because, without state authority, humans will simply seek to maximise their private property and obtain an unequal share of the rewards in society. Second, Marxist socialists claim that anarchism is unscientific because (1) it relies on generalisations and untested assumptions about human nature (2) it has no theory of history or explanation of how society develops (3) its rejection of capitalism (as oppressive and unjust) fails to acknowledge the role capitalism plays in shaping popular consciousness.

You might also like

What is anarchism?

10th December 2015

Making the Argument for Anarchism

9th August 2017

Max Stirner (1806-1856)

Anarchism and rejection of the state, anarchism and organised religion, anarchism and liberty, anarchism and order, anarcho-capitalism, our subjects.

• › Criminology
• › Economics
• › Geography
• › Health & Social Care
• › Psychology
• › Sociology
• › Teaching & learning resources
• › Student revision workshops
• › Online student courses
• › CPD for teachers
• › Livestreams
• › Teaching jobs

Boston House, 214 High Street, Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, LS23 6AD Tel: 01937 848885

• › Contact us
• › Terms of use
• › Privacy & cookies

© 2002-2024 Tutor2u Limited. Company Reg no: 04489574. VAT reg no 816865400.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Utopia — A “Perfect Society” in “Utopia” Written by Sir Thomas More

A "Perfect Society" in "Utopia" Written by Sir Thomas More

• Categories: Society Utopia

About this sample

Words: 1016 |

Published: Jan 21, 2020

Words: 1016 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof. Kifaru

Verified writer

• Expert in: Sociology Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3.5 pages / 1599 words

1 pages / 585 words

1 pages / 3161 words

2.5 pages / 1232 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Utopia

Utopias and dystopias are two seemingly opposite concepts that have been explored extensively in literature, philosophy, and popular culture. While utopias depict ideal societies where everything is perfect and harmonious, [...]

The concept of a utopian government has been a subject of much debate and speculation throughout history. The idea of an ideal society with a perfect government has been explored in literature, philosophy, and political theory. [...]

An ideal society has been a subject of philosophical discourse, imagination, and aspiration for centuries. It represents a vision of a harmonious, just, and equitable community where individuals live fulfilling lives. While the [...]

The importance of Utopia in the Renaissance cannot be overstated. It provided a platform for critical thinking, social commentary, and the exploration of alternative possibilities. By presenting ideal societies, writers and [...]

Government is an important part of any country. Whether the officials in charge are skilled or not at their jobs can make or break the country. The United States of America will probably be headed more toward "break" due to the [...]

Utopia and Dystopia are two contrasting concepts that have captured the imaginations of writers, thinkers, and readers for centuries. These seemingly opposite ideas share surprising similarities, which reveal deep insights into [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Study Guides
• Homework Questions

Utopia Persuasive Essay

• Arts & Humanities

How to Order Our Online Writing Services.

There is nothing easier than using our essay writer service. Here is how everything works at :

• You fill out an order form. Make sure to provide us with all the details. If you have any comments or additional files, upload them. This will help your writer produce the paper that will exactly meet your needs.
• You pay for the order with our secure payment system.
• Once we receive the payment confirmation, we assign an appropriate writer to work on your project. You can track the order's progress in real-time through the personal panel. Also, there is an option to communicate with your writer, share additional files, and clarify all the details.
• As soon as the paper is done, you receive a notification. Now, you can read its preview version carefully in your account. If you are satisfied with our professional essay writing services, you confirm the order and download the final version of the document to your computer. If, however, you consider that any alterations are needed, you can always request a free revision. All our clients can use free revisions within 14 days after delivery. Please note that the author will revise your paper for free only if the initial requirements for the paper remain unchanged. If the revision is not applicable, we will unconditionally refund your account. However, our failure is very unlikely since almost all of our orders are completed issue-free and we have 98% satisfied clients.

As you can see, you can always turn to us with a request "Write essay for me" and we will do it. We will deliver a paper of top quality written by an expert in your field of study without delays. Furthermore, we will do it for an affordable price because we know that students are always looking for cheap services. Yes, you can write the paper yourself but your time and nerves are worth more!

• Our Listings
• Our Rentals
• Testimonials
• Tenant Portal

Finished Papers