Utopianism is a form of social theory which attempts to promote certain desired values and practices by presenting them in an ideal state or society. Utopian writers do not normally think of such states as realizable, at least in anything like their perfectly portrayed form. But nor are they engaging in a merely fanciful or fantastic exercise, as the popular use of the term suggests. Often, as in Plato’s Republic, the first true Utopia, the aim is to show something of the essential nature of a concept—justice or freedom—by painting it large, in the form of an ideal community based on such a concept. At other times, as with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the object is primarily critical or satirical, to scourge the vices of the writer’s society by an artful contrast with the virtuous people of Utopia. Only rarely—Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a good example—do Utopian writers seek to transform society according to the blueprint painstakingly drawn in their Utopia. Essentially the function of utopias is heuristic.
Until the seventeenth century, utopias were generally located in geographically remote areas of the globe. The European voyages of discovery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries killed off this useful device by making the world too familiar. From then on utopias were spatially displaced: to outer space—journeys to the moon begin in the seventeenth century—or beneath the sea, as in the frequent discovery of the sunken civilization of Atlantis, or deep below the earth’s crust. But increasingly too the displacement was temporal rather than spatial, a move encouraged first by the seventeenth-century idea of progress and later by the vastly expanded notion of time offered by the new geology and biology of Lyell and Darwin. Instead of Utopia being the better place, it became the better time. H.G.Wells took his Time-Traveller billions of years into the future, and Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men (1930) employed a timescale of 2,000 million years to show the ascent of humans to full Utopian stature.
The displacement of space by time also produced a new sociological realism in Utopias.
Utopias were now placed in history and, however distant the Utopian consummation, it could at least be presented as something that humankind was tending towards, perhaps inevitably. The link with science and technology in the seventeenth century—as in Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and Campanella’s City of the Sun (1637)—strengthened this development. With the rise of nineteenth-century socialism, itself heavily Utopian, Utopianism became increasingly a debate about the possible realization of socialism. The utopias of Bellamy and Wells (A Modern Utopia, 1905) were the most powerful pleas on behalf of orthodox socialism, but William Morris offered an attractive alternative version in News from Nowhere (1890). An alternative of a different kind came with the invention of the dystopia or anti-Utopia, an inversion and a savage critique of all Utopian hopes. Foreshadowed in Samuel Butler’s anti-Darwinian Erewhon (1872), it reached its apogee in the 1930s and 1940s, especially with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Only B.F.Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) kept the Utopian torch alight in these dark years, and there were many who saw in this Utopia of behavioural engineering a nightmare worse than the blackest dystopia. Utopianism, however, revived strongly in the 1960s, in such works as Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation (1969), and is to be found alive and flourishing in the futurological and ecological movements.
Perhaps Utopianism is inherent in the human condition, perhaps only in those cultures affected by the classical and Christian traditions; but one might well agree with Oscar Wilde that ‘a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at’.
Krishan Kumar
University of Kent
Further reading
Kumar, K. (1987) Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Oxford.
Manuel, F.E. and Manuel, F.P. (1979) Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge, MA.
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