Utopia

The Invention of Utopia

The term utopia was coined by the English writer Sir Thomas More in his book, Utopia (1516). More combined, in a punning way, two Greek words, eutopia = the good place, and outopia = no place. Utopia is therefore the good place that is nowhere.

This would seem to lend itself to the most fantastic products of the imagination, unchecked by any considerations of reality or rationality. The wider reaches of science fiction, as well as the fantasies of the dream, would seem to belong to its province. If utopia, by definition, is not and never can be somewhere, why restrict ourselves to the merely practicable, let alone the realistically probable? Why not give the freest plays to our fancies, let our imaginations rip in the devising of schemes for the fullest fulfillment of our desires?

There are indeed, it seems, at all times and in all societies, forms of thought and popular culture that express this kind of longing. Nearly all societies have traditions of Paradise or the Golden Age, a time and a place where the pain and privations of everyday life did not exist and all lived freely and blissfully. There are folk images of the Land of Cockaygne and Schlaraffenland, places of exuberantly unrestrained wishes and more or less instant gratification. There are El Dorados and Shangri-las where people live in peace, harmony, and everlasting contentment.

But these are not utopia—not, at least, as that form has been understood and practiced for more than 500 years in the West. From the very beginning, from More's own rational and restrained vision in his Utopia, utopia has displayed a certain sobriety, a certain wish to walk in step with current realities. It is as if it has wanted deliberately to distinguish itself from the wilder fancies of the popular imagination. Typically, it has been a form of the high literary culture of the age. Certainly it has wished to go beyond its own time and place. It has sought to create a picture of a good, even perfect, society. But it has wanted to remain within the realm of the possible. It has wanted to work with the human and social materials at hand; it has accepted the psychological and sociological realities of human society. The realm of utopia is wide, but it is not boundless. Utopia, while it liberates the imagination, also sets limits. This is perhaps the source of its fascination—and its strength.

More's Utopia initiated a tradition of social thought that has had a continuous history ever since (More's own book, remarkably, has been in print in one language or another without a break since its original publication). In addition to Utopia, certain major utopian works inspired by it—Anton Francesco Doni's I Mondi (1553), Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis (1619), Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1623), and Bacon's New Atlantis (1627)—achieved great fame among European men of letters. All utopian writers were aware of these great exemplars even when they sought, as in Bishop Hall's Mundus Alter et Idem (1605) or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), to satirize or rebut them (thus inventing the anti-utopia or dystopia). Right down to the twentieth century, we can trace the continuing influence of the great early modern utopias.

...