On the Nature of Utopian Fictions

Utopian literature encompasses texts whose fictional nature is of a specific type. In literary realism, events and characters are fictional constructs deriving from speech acts of make-believe.¹ At the same time, their spatiotemporal matrix is intended to evoke a space and time that resembles that of the real world; in other words, it mirrors, in some way, our knowledge-based mental constructs of the 19th century, the 1980s, Paris, or London.² Utopias, however, are fictions where space and/or time are themselves either explicitly posited as merely hypothetical (and thus they remain fictions even while not being formally fictional, for instance when they are embedded as thought experiments in philosophical or pedagogical discourse) or implicitly invested with the playful unreality that pertains to the speech acts of fiction (as in the emblematic joke contained in Thomas More’s 1517 letter to Peter Giles):

If I had done nothing else than impose names on ruler, river, city, and island such as might suggest to the more learned that the island was nowhere, the city a phantom, the river without water, and the ruler without a people, it would not have been hard to do and would have been much wittier than what I actually did. Unless the faithfulness of an historian had been binding on me, I am not so stupid as to have preferred to use those barbarous and meaningless names, Utopia, Anydrus, Amaurotum, and Ademus.³

The hexastichon of Utopia’s poet laureate Anemolius, along with William Budé’s letter to Thomas Lupset, both added to the paratexts of the 1518 (Basel) edition, complete the basic network of semantic possibilities the genre’s name contains: Utopia deserves to be called a “Eutopia” (good place) as well, the poem suggests. But it could just as well be called “Udepotia” (Neverland), as Budé testifies that he has heard: “Udepotia apellari audio.”⁴ From More’s island on, utopias will be defined by this nexus of goodness (or virtue) plus nowhereness and/or neverness. When they are not presented as mere legends or as thought experiments, they turn out to be impossible to locate on any map. After the publication of Louis Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440 in 1771, they will also begin to involve a proximate or more remote future—a time that has not yet come into existence.

Utopias are not the only literary fictions that lack referents in the space and time experienced or historically known by their readers: fantasy fiction, say of the type of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), J. R. R. Tolkien’s immensely popular Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), or The Hobbit (1937), also lacks grounding in a space and time that can be correlated to those of contemporary or historical reality. But in utopias, unlike in fantasy fiction, reality persists in the form of explicit references to the social, economic, and ideological world as it historically was and as it currently (and recognizably) is. Whereas utopias, therefore, can be said to be more drastically fictional than realist fictions (since in them fictional characters engage in fictional lives in a space and time without contemporary or historical existence), they are also far less escapist than fantasy fiction. In them, existing social and economic conditions are vitally important: they provide the negative counterpoints to utopian projections and thus, effectively, the implicit motivation for the imagining of the utopian world. It follows that neither magic nor the supernatural (present not only in fantasy fiction but also in so-called magical realism) dictates the nature of events in utopian fictional worlds: new-fangled inventions and even new species of beings may well play a role in the subcategory of texts we know as science fiction utopias, but they are posited as results of scientific research (or accidents deriving from it) rather than as arbitrary emanations of a suspension of the known laws of nature. Neither do they themselves determine the operation of utopian institutions and social functions, which are rather the result of ordinary laws of intention, planning, and causality.

But an understanding of how literary utopias compare with other forms of fiction does not yet pose the thorny question of what they are. Definitions of the genre, often convergent, sometimes radically divergent and heterogeneous, abound. Much can be usefully elucidated, however, by distinguishing between the moral and ideological functions of utopias and the mechanisms of meaning production on which such functions rely. In the former case, utopian literature is appraised and interpreted in terms of the social circumstances of its conception by an author and those of its reception as a text—that is, in relation to subjects (author, reader) who are not themselves utopian but are situated outside the utopian fictional world. Such approaches will inevitably tend to integrate utopian fictions within some discussion of utopianism as a tendency of the human mind for imagining alternative and somehow “better” and more desirable worlds and modes of social existence. Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition is illustrative of this approach. For him, utopia is “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space . . . that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived” (emphases added).⁵

Of course, not all morally and ideologically based definitions focus exclusively on the import of the content of the depiction of utopian society. Darko Suvin’s definition, for instance, registers the importance of its interplay with form, particularly as regards what he calls “cognitive estrangement” within utopian fictions. Thus, utopia

is the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis [emphases added].⁶

Despite Suvin’s greater emphasis on formal properties within utopias, however, utopia remains a sociologically resonant—and not simply a literary—pursuit. Inevitably, then, it will also be correlated with positively or negatively appraised functions of the work of the human imagination. In the broader scholarship, these functions include utopia’s anticipatory potency and its indispensability as a heuristic.⁷ More liberal versions underline utopia’s utility in sustaining regulatory ideals and encouraging pursuits of perfectibility.⁸ Finally, in more negative appraisals, criticism has emphasized utopia’s penchant for dogmatism and its seduction by the abstractions of blueprint and method at the expense of acknowledging the imperfect character of human affairs and the preferability of “piecemeal” and cautious reform.⁹ When viewed thus, utopias are likely to be either praised as necessary and vital or warned against as simplistic and dangerous exercises of the imagination without much attention to the formal preconditions involved in the production and negotiation of social meanings.

Matters are arguably different when utopias are considered in terms not of what but of how they mean: they will then more likely appear as textual worlds that are not inherently better and more desirable or worse and less desirable than ours, but are inherently meant to be different—they work differently or express different collective goals, a different conception of human virtue or happiness, and different principles of collective human organization.¹⁰ In a sense, this is the anthropological or ethnographic aspect of utopias as opposed to their ethical aspect, since in anthropological and ethnographic accounts cultural and social differences are not appraised in terms of comparative value or desirability but rather examined with the purpose of understanding their own, immanent logic, consequences, and implications. Whereas the former standpoint privileges sociological or ethical approaches, the latter privileges semiotic and structuralist approaches, of the sort that shaped the practice of modern anthropological and ethnographic inquiry (most eminently, in Claude Lévi-Strauss).¹¹ Thus, to take Louis Marin’s Utopics as a paradigmatic instance of such approaches,

Utopic discourse . . . is a discourse that stages—sets in full view—an imaginary (or fictional) solution to [a] contradiction. . . . Utopia is fiction . . . its function is very close to that of the staging of mythic narrative . . . the fable furnishes a kind of space of representation in which contradiction can be figured and played out as a simulacrum so that it can be contemplated as an object of knowledge.¹²

Marin’s emphasis on contradiction as the raw material of utopian fiction, considered in terms of its internal construction as a world of words, is important and will be considered in more detail later. For now, it is necessary to underline that Utopias tend to appear as instances of what Timothy Brennan has called an “organizational imaginary.”¹³ Their potential to generate social meaning is correlated to their nature as fictions of organization, whether this be the organization of daily activity, of labor, of city space, of modes of scientific inquiry, or of the body, sexuality, death, childbirth, and warfare. Roland Barthes’s Sade/Fourier/Loyola, which heretically correlated the writings of a utopian social theorist (Fourier) with those of a religious reformer (Loyola) and of an infamous advocate of sexual transgression (de Sade), is remarkably adept at grasping this frequently overlooked dimension of literary utopias. Barthes remarks that three operations mark the shared territory of the textual practice of his authors:

Though what is at stake in Barthes’s view of these operations is certainly akin to textual play and the pleasure of the text, it would be reductive to treat their import as mere jeu d’esprit, a “delight in construction,” whereby “the mind takes its satisfaction in the sheer operations of putting together new models of this or that perfect society.”¹⁵ As James Holstun’s extensive preoccupation with the “organizational imaginary” of early modern and Puritan utopias already suggests, the shadow of Foucauldian discipline is always looming in the utopian passion for rational reordering and reassembly.¹⁶ Clearly, therefore, the semiotic and structuralist lens does not entirely remove utopian fictions from the sphere of earlier (and, more specifically, Cold War–era) indictments of utopian fiction for their allegedly repressive and even totalitarian nature.

It is important, therefore, to take into account Fredric Jameson’s drastic reworking of the problem at hand, summed up in terms of a series of interlocking propositions:

Jameson’s analysis provides a hermeneutic path beyond the widely spread critical aversion toward anything that smacks of the blueprint.²² The problem with this tendency, virtually canonized within many postmodern critical views of the stakes involved in utopian fiction, is that it tends to forget that our own prevailing mode of production—namely, capitalism—is also a system; indeed, the most totalizing, world-engulfing one that ever was. The rejection of alternative organizational imaginaries is, by default, submission to the organizational imaginary that already prevails. Nor should it be overlooked that there is a long-term correlation between utopian longing and an actual experience of social dissolution and entropy.²³ By the time of its early modern maturation as literary fiction, utopia registers the impact of a prolonged and uncertain transition to the capitalist mode of production that was attended precisely by a traumatic experience of disorganization: the dissolution of communal relations, customs, and relations to land; the scattering of populations; the destruction of village life in the countryside.²⁴

Classical Templates

There is broad scholarly consensus as to the earliest glimmerings of the “utopian impulse,” as Ernst Bloch would call it, in Western literature. At its simplest, this impulse expresses itself in terms of depicting a mythic world of “sensual gratification,” which is bestowed by the gods rather than being the result of human effort.²⁵ Hesiod’s Works and Days (around 700 bce), probably the earliest such depiction in the Western world, envisions the first human beings as a “golden race” living almost like gods under the reign of Cronus: they are “free from care” as well as “toil and distress,” are not oppressed by old age, have plenty to eat, and share everything freely. In his fascinating study on isonomia (or no-rule, as he calls it), Kōjin Karatani suggests that the Hesiodic myth preserves the memory of the rise and fall of the primitive communism of a society drastically different from both Athenian democracy and Greek varieties of aristocratic rule: that of Ionian cities, which valorized freedom, resisted the authoritarian implications of clan society’s institutions, and opposed human exploitation and subjection.²⁶ Ultimately, Karatani notes, Ionian isonomia declined, partly because of military weakness toward aggressive clan societies, partly because of the failure of Ionian cities to federate, and partly because of a slow internal erosion of the foundations of social equality.²⁷ Perhaps it was this sad decline, then, that, at the level of myth, suggested that the enviable life of the golden age was independent of human volition and planning, precarious and vulnerable to divine whim: “Afterwards those who have their mansions on Olympus made a second race, much worse, of silver.” The adulterating process posited by myth goes on until Zeus finally creates the fourth race of heroes, some of whom dwell happily on the “islands of the Blessed,” and the fifth, extant, human generation out of iron. The character of its life comes in stark contrast with that of the first humans, of which it is the sad and degenerate echo: “They will not cease from toil and distress by day, nor from being worn out by suffering at night, and the gods will give them grievous cares.”²⁸

The myth of the golden race, transformed by Roman times to the aurea ætas or golden age associated with the reign of the god Saturn, surfaces in several texts of the classical period.²⁹ In Pindar’s account of theodicy in the second Olympian Ode (around 475 bce), “good men receive a life of less toil” and “spend a tearless existence.” The most courageous of them “travel the road of Zeus to the tower of Kronos, where ocean breezes blow round the Isle of the Blessed.”³⁰ More consequentially, the myth of a period of superior and felicitous existence that has disappeared surfaces in the works of Plato, whose Republic (around 375 bce) and Laws (around 350 bce) arguably constitute the most important precursors to Thomas More’s Renaissance coinage of a name and a genre of fiction. In Plato’s Statesman (around 360 bce), the Stranger refers to the age of Cronus, when “there was neither anything savage nor any act of feeding on one another, and there was no war at all and no sedition either.” In this mythical age, humans “had abundant fruits from trees and woodlands of many different sorts, which did not grow by farming, but the earth sent them spontaneously.”³¹ The Republic provides a more famous instance: the “noble lie” Socrates advises must be told to the prospective guardians of his ideal city is the “Phoenician tale” according to which the god ordained the predestined rulers of the city by mixing gold into their substance, while he used silver for their auxiliaries and “iron and brass” in the third class of “the farmers and other craftsmen.”³²

But what are the main features of the myth of the golden age?³³ First, it is nostalgic or backward-looking.³⁴ Though there are versions of the myth wherein a future return to the blissful reign of Cronus is intimated (as in Virgil), almost all of them agree that originally the ideal human condition occurred in the past.³⁵ Second, in its main thrust, the myth concerns a downward (in Greek, literally a catastrophic) turn, from perfection to imperfection, from order to entropy, and from joy and bliss to pain and sorrow; third, the golden age myth does not concern improved civic, legal, or political arrangements but rather a “natural state” of abundance, peace, and human communal fraternity, which is adulterated with time; fourth, neither the originally blissful state of affairs nor its subsequent degeneration is primarily the result of human effort. Whatever abundance is available to humans is a result of the bountiful gifts of nature and the gods rather than human labor.³⁶ As Jocelyn Groisard and others have shown, the myth of the golden age thus reflects the tendency of the classical Greek mind to think of history in fundamentally (though not always exclusively) cyclical terms—ones that presupposed the temporal infinity of a spatially bounded cosmos and thus structurally privileged forms of cyclical or quasi-cyclical repetition from generation to decay and back.³⁷ In all these respects, the myth and its subsequent (pagan and Christian, spiritual and territorial) reincarnations, which appear in a number of writings well into the medieval world (Atlantis, Arcadia, Saint Brendan’s Isle, the land of Prester John, the land of Cockaygne, the Promised Land, Paradise/Eden), differ fundamentally from the human-made, rational, planned, economically, epistemologically, or technologically developed and stable societies envisioned by early modern utopias—and, arguably, by certain key dimensions of Plato’s own texts.³⁸

The Platonic Moment

The Republic makes immediately clear that it is a thought experiment, undertaken by human intelligence and driven by human design, to imagine the logical prerequisites of a just city. For Socrates, who is the protagonist and principal mental designer of such a city, this also means a unified city, one that would be able to avoid the fate of actual and historical Greek city-states: strife and stasis, social turmoil and internal warfare.³⁹ Being the first (albeit expository rather than narrative) fiction of organization in Western history, The Republic solves the problem of attaining unity while acknowledging the empirical realities of class division by positing the planned division of the population of the Kallipolis, the good city, along three classes, between which there exists absolute division of labor and only limited social mobility.⁴⁰ The Guardians are at the administrative top, the so-called Auxiliaries are in the middle, and the numerically superior but spiritually inferior class of craftsmen and merchants is placed at the bottom. Indeed, the need to secure fixed dividing lines between the Guardians, recruited from those who possess true knowledge (epistēmē) of the world and of city affairs, the Auxiliaries, recruited from those who possess “spiritedness” (thūmos) and can effectively defend the city, and the common lot of desire-driven producers, is what drives Plato back to the raw material of the myth of the golden age. This myth is here thoroughly reworked and transformed into an instrument of ideological regulation, if not manipulation. “I wonder,” Socrates remarks to his interlocutor Glaucon, “if we could contrive one of those convenient stories . . . some magnificent myth that would in itself carry conviction to our whole community, including, if possible, the Guardians themselves?” (414b–414c).⁴¹

Transformed from its original function as vehicle of a pessimistic cosmogony to a principle of ideologically legitimating the synchronic division of the city population in what Socrates believes is the optimal fashion, the golden age myth now serves two partly contradictory functions: on the one hand, it serves to naturalize social hierarchy—a task further carried out when, in later sections of The Republic, Socrates correlates the three metals of the three classes to the similarly hierarchical function of three faculties within the human soul.⁴² On the other hand, it dislocates hierarchy from its normal (one might say, anti- or non-utopian) correlation with wealth and with the power of money.⁴³ Being told that they are made by the god with gold and silver, Socrates will cunningly remark, the Guardians and Auxiliaries will be dissuaded from having any access to gold, including by learning to treat it as miasma—as an unclean, because it is earthly, counterpart to the divine gold and silver of their creation:

They must be told that they have no need of mortal and material gold and silver, because they have in their hearts the heavenly gold and silver given them by the gods as a permanent possession, and it would be wicked to pollute the heavenly gold in their possession by mixing it with earthly, for theirs is without impurity, while that in currency among men is a common source of wickedness. They alone, therefore, of all the citizens are forbidden to touch or handle silver or gold; they must not come under the same roof as them, nor wear them as ornaments, nor drink from vessels made of them.⁴⁴

The well-known communism of The Republic, its stipulations for abolishing private property and wealth, therefore applies only to the top echelons of the well-governed city, wherein the principle that each must mind their own business according to their nature and abilities and not interfere with that of others is supplemented with the equally important principle of dislocating political power from wealth and its influence.⁴⁵

To the extent that The Republic is both a philosophical fiction on the benefits of intentional, philosophically driven social reorganization and one that preserves the utopian core of the golden age myth of communal existence and the absence of private property, it could be said to anticipate key elements of More’s Utopia several centuries before the Renaissance.⁴⁶ But there are important differences as well, extending beyond the formal difference between philosophical fictions, wherein the hypothetical, thought-experiment aspect of dwelling on social alternatives is explicit, and the speech acts of make-believe and play associated with fiction proper. Most prominently, The Republic’s organizational imaginary is curiously immaterial and despatialized: there is no concern with the physical topography of the better society or with its architecture or its urban planning. There is likewise minimal interest in its institutional and legal arrangements, the specifics of governance, or the character of everyday life.⁴⁷ Plato is far more concerned with questions such as the physical, military, and philosophical education of Guardians and Auxiliaries and, ultimately, with the prerequisites for true philosophical knowledge. If, therefore, The Republic constitutes a work of “high utopianism,” as Doyne Dawson would have it, it is also the case that in it, the city “is divorced from topos in a double sense”; lacking a place in the real, the good city “will also lack any concrete reference to the spatial and material organization of the polis in its ideal form.”⁴⁸

Nor is it possible for Plato’s text to escape from the limits imposed by the predominantly degenerative conceptions of human history in the classical period by imagining a society that attains stability and permanence when it achieves optimal organization.⁴⁹ Plato’s metaphysical dualism, whereby all things earthly and sensible are subject to change and therefore decay and corruption and whereby only the realm of the intelligible Idea attains to the immobile ataraxia of perfection, holds here as well.⁵⁰ Therefore, the Kallipolis is skeptically admitted to not only being impossible on earth but also, even if it were to be realized, impermanent:⁵¹ “It will be difficult to bring about any change for the worse in a state so constituted,” Socrates notes, “but since all created things must decay, even a social order of this kind cannot last for all time, but will decline.”⁵²

The Laws, Plato’s last and longest dialogue (and the only one which does not involve Socrates as an interlocutor), offers something like a reversal of the priorities set by The Republic: to begin with, it abandons the goal of imagining a fully ideal city, settling for the “second best,” since in Magnesia, whose speculative foundation is the dialogue’s subject matter, private property in land is preserved for all classes (though it is also strictly regulated in terms of its minimal and maximal extent and though gold and silver remain prohibited).⁵³ This decision, in turn, dictates an extensive discussion of legislation, which in The Republic received far less attention.⁵⁴ The dialogue minimizes preoccupation with the education of those entrusted with the highest offices of maintaining order in the city—an issue that only appears to preoccupy the Athenian exponent of Magnesia at the end of the last book of The Laws and to remain inconclusive. Most important, perhaps, Magnesia is a city concretely rendered. Whereas the Kallipolis had been effectively “devoid of any physical dimension,” the “second best” city is fleshed out in as much topographic, geographical, and urbanistic detail as possible.⁵⁵ Indeed, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet remarked, what prevails in The Laws is a “passion for regulation” that extends to virtually all aspects of life and that seems to feed on the numerous mathematical and geometrical regularities this passion is able to generate.⁵⁶

Having posited that internal strife is the gravest problem the ancient city-state faces and that the purpose of an adjudicator is therefore to “reconcile” a “family at variance with itself” by “his regulations,” the Athenian launches his apparently paradoxical method of securing the supreme good of unity: multiple division.⁵⁷ He thus proposes that the speculative city of Magnesia should have a fixed number of 5,040 households, enthusiastically noting that this number is “divisible by every integer from one to twelve, with the exception of eleven,” and is thus eminently suitable both for purposes of war and “to suit the engagements and combinations of peace.”⁵⁸ From this stringently fixed number he then derives his desirable class system (four classes of property holders, the poorest holding the value of a single allotment, the wealthiest of four, with 1,260 household owners in each class); his city sections (twelve roughly equivalent departments, each therefore housing 420 households); the correlation of each city section (and therefore tribe) to a patron god or goddess; the distribution of magistrates (one-twelfth of their total number responsible for each of the twelve calendar months); the composition of the city council (360 members, equally divided among the four property classes to yield ninety council members for each class); the selection of rural commissioners (sixty in total, five for each city section), and so on.⁵⁹

For the Athenian, who argues that the “facts of number” must be “thoroughly mastered” by legislators, there is no branch of knowledge with the same “potent efficacy as the theory of numbers,” whose “subdivisions and complications” possess a “universal usefulness.”⁶⁰ Number allows for “standardization,” and standardization is the means of intentionally mastering the play of differences pragmatically necessitated by the multiple kinds of division of labor the functional city necessitates.⁶¹ Deployed within the framework of a precocious political arithmetic, number becomes the foundation of what Nicole Loraux might call a “bond of division”: it splits the polis into a multiplicity of administrative, juridical, religious, and military units wherein citizens’ bodies can be recombined almost endlessly, thus cultivating a spirit at once of camaraderie and surveillance within a face-to-face and knowable community.⁶² In all these respects, as well as in its pronounced preference for isolation and insularity, Plato’s imagined city approximates the organizational imaginary of early modern utopia more than anything else in the classical, Roman, and medieval world.⁶³ On the flip side, however, the harsh realism on which the Athenian insists tips the balance away from the specifically utopian. So obsessive and overwhelming is his passion for regulation and regularity that the very possibility of freedom or happiness virtually collapses under the weight of myriads of procedural specifications, strictures, and penalties (including an alarming number of reasons for resorting to capital punishment). Organization seems to have become an end in itself rather than a means to social and individual emancipation.

Derivations and Innovations in the Roman and Hellenistic Periods

After Plato, the utopian imagination of the classical world abandoned highly organized legal, political, and institutional arrangements and returned to earlier, essentially mythological notions of god-given or natural abundance and bliss. Yet there are innovations that will play a prominent role in the utopias of the Renaissance: Iambulus’s narrative of the “Island of the Sun,” preserved in Diodorus Sicilus’s Bibliotheca Historica (1st century bce), for instance, adopts the conceit of the voyage to exotic and unknown lands that will dominate the utopian genre in the early modern period. It is likewise significant, in light of later developments, that Iambulus abandons the Platonic format of avowed philosophical speculation for that of narrative fiction, providing the reader with a relation of marvelous discoveries:⁶⁴on the island that the protagonist and his fellow captive discover, the inhabitants have flexible bones, are hairless, and have bisected tongues that render them able to hold two separate conversations at once.⁶⁵ Such elements of the exotic and incredible coexist, in a hybrid of sorts, with the established proto-utopian theme of natural plenty and with the Platonic theme of communal social life, of which the narrative notes:⁶⁶“Thanks to this institution [the communal possession of women and children] no rivalry arises among them and they live their lives free of internal discord, setting the greatest value on social harmony.”⁶⁷

Lucian’s True History (2nd century ce) is likewise a hybrid of satire and utopia, as well as a compendium of different travel encounters: the journey to the moon (after crossing the Pillars of Hercules) is related in an overwhelmingly satirical manner, which dwells pleasurably on the grotesque and incredible features of the world of the Selenites (a world that is other far more than it is in any way better).⁶⁸ The description of the Island of the Blest still follows the more traditional and idealizing path of Hesiodic myth, imagining the island as a place of splendor, eternally good weather, supernatural fertility, and beauty.⁶⁹ Yet, here too, elements of satire are preserved, including jabs directed against Plato and Socrates, with the latter being charged with insufferable garrulousness and the former proclaimed absent from the island, as he “was living in the city he had invented” in The Republic and in The Laws.⁷⁰ The conjunction of utopian and satirical modes is important for the subsequent evolution of the genre, given the fact that works as otherwise diverse as More’s Utopia, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1534), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) can be viewed as deriving from different calibrations of the utopian and the satirical mode.⁷¹ Likewise significant is Lucian’s overt and playful admission of fictionality, which will be taken up by a number of Renaissance texts.⁷²

Questions of Utopianism in the Medieval World

In her book on medieval utopias, Karma Lochrie criticizes the tendency of literary historians to replicate the act whereby King Utopus separates the island of Utopia from the continent, thereby reading More’s text as one severed from a historical past and constituting a “conceptual and generic enclave” synonymous with the rise of modernity. To the degree that pre-Morean utopianism is read as merely anticipatory, there is indeed a tendency to oversimplify and flatten literary genealogies. At the same time, it is very difficult, as Lochrie herself admits, to find works that appear linked to utopia in the Middle Ages if one uses More’s own generic template as the standard.⁷³ Leaving out the usual suspects of the story of Prester John in John Mandeville’s Travels and the 14th-century poem on the Land of Cockaygne, secular utopian narratives in the Western world (the Islamic one between the 9th and the 13th centuries is a different affair) do appear to be few and far between.⁷⁴

For Lochrie, this is a result of exceedingly restrictive and indeed anachronistic criteria. But this does not answer the question of why a pre-Christian writer like Plato shares more with early modern utopianism than most of his Christian epigones. It seems important, therefore, to also take at least two further factors into account: first, the sinking of much of classical and Roman/Hellenistic literature into disrepute or oblivion during the Middle Ages, for reasons ranging from their physical destruction to their theologically unacceptable nature. Second (and even more important), visions of the Millennium, the New Jerusalem, and Paradise effectively displace pagan visions of a better world after Lucian. This is no mere change of topoi, however; nor is it irrelevant to the conception of utopia proper in terms of an organizational imaginary.

In a vital essay, J. C. Davies contrasted early modern utopianism with Christian notions of the millennium, noting that their fundamental difference consists in the millennial opposition to “formalization” compared to its privileging in utopias. From the standpoint of fervent religious faith, formality

deceived the godly because it was the sin of the seeming saint; . . . it was godliness perverted into a preoccupation, negative or positive, with externals; . . . Since God was not a god of stasis but a dynamic, perpetually intervening providential presence . . . forms were at best ephemeral things, and a preoccupation with them revealed a kind of idolatrous diversion.

Nothing could be further from such thinking than the utopias of early modernity, which, like their Platonic, classical counterparts, respond “to a world of deficient formality with improved and perfected form,” with a reorganization of the theretofore informal.⁷⁵ While faith in the millennium therefore “meant embracing the dissolution of all human social contrivances, the destruction of all formalities,” utopia, on the contrary, presupposed the possibility, at least, of reconciling “authority and liberty” within a framework of law “duly or formally observed” (see graph 1).⁷⁶

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Graph 1. The “Golden Age” (Golden Race) Myth.

There is perhaps no clearer illustration of the importance of Davis’s observations than the decidedly formalist pursuits of a religious text like Saint Augustine’s City of God (De Civitate Dei), first published in 426 ce. Of course, there are differences from Platonic precedent: though, like Plato, Augustine composed his work in an era haunted by war and internal disarray, the tensions between the political realm and the sphere of kinship, family, and economic life that inform classical and Platonic thought have been replaced by their conflation—as both Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt were to observe—in feudal society. Augustine’s imagined polity can thus no longer be a concretely planned site in which the desire for a healthy and stabilizing restructuring of civic life may seek its experimental realization.⁷⁷ Rather, as classical oppositions between unity and multiplicity, harmony and fragmentation, or the public and the private gave way to the Christian antithesis between the sacred and the profane, the desirable, good polity was correspondingly subjected to allegorical abstraction and spiritualization.

Accordingly, the City of God dwells on the origins and destiny of two cities, which constitute the allegorical types into which the great multiplicity of “the many and very great nations throughout the world” can be retrospectively reduced.⁷⁸ Their names vary: they are the earthly and the heavenly city; the city of flesh and the city of spirit; the city of the world or of Man and the city of God; the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalem; Babylon and Sion [Zion]; the ungodly city and the pilgrim city.⁷⁹ Yet the fact that all these oppositions involve negative and positive poles does not mean that they are all versions of the same archetypal binary. Upon referring to Adam’s dual posterity in Cain and Abel, Augustine notes that only the former, founder of the sinful “city of man,” built a city at all. Abel, “as though he were merely a pilgrim on earth, built none.” The opposition between the “worldly city” and the “city of God” is thus supplemented by a second, Neoplatonist opposition between the true “eternal City,” which can exist only in heaven, and its “shadow,” which is “cast on earth” as its typological anticipation. Though marked by imperfection, this “shadow” is by no means identical to the temporal city; yet it is also not “free” like “that Jerusalem which is above,” since it exists “in bondage to symbolic purpose.”⁸⁰ In essence, the terms of the City of God are three rather than two: to the ungodly and pagan city of the world (to which classical philosophers themselves are consigned, incidentally) one must add both the worldly “copy” of the heavenly city and its heavenly prototype.⁸¹

The lapse in formal symmetry is neither accidental nor inconsequential. Augustine’s godly city remains, despite its sensually abstract quality (one may usefully compare it to the vividness with which the New Jerusalem is described in St. John’s Revelation), a work with a pragmatic political purpose.⁸² Arguing against those who saw Christian zealotry as responsible for the fall of Rome, it seeks to defend the feasibility, in this world, of a civic virtue that is both compatible with Christian principles and politically sustainable.⁸³ Augustine therefore observed that prophetic writings do not merely refer to either an “earthly” or a “heavenly” Jerusalem; they also contain references “to both simultaneously.”⁸⁴ The negative logical implications of this remark are more fully taken up later, when the author remarks that Rome, though it was of course earthly, was also in a fundamental sense an “unreal city”: the lack of a “mutual recognition of rights” among its citizens deprived it of justice, which is the only genuine foundation of the “commonwealth.”⁸⁵ However, Augustine argues, to the extent that the heavenly city acquires an earthly manifestation, peace (defined as the “ordered harmony of authority and obedience between citizens”) is compatible with the terrestrial provisions of civil law.⁸⁶ Indeed, “as long as the two cities are mingled together,” Augustine notes, “the peace we share with Babylon” remains valid, even if it is “more like a solace for unhappiness than the joy of beatitude.”⁸⁷ In other words, the existence of the congregation of God’s elect (it is this multinational and incipiently global community that really constitutes the civitas Dei and not a limited territorial entity) is no impediment to the exercise of territorial and temporal state authority, so long as the latter respects religious duty.⁸⁸ Rather, the faithful may well possess a double citizenship, showing allegiance to both the temporal and the spiritual kingdom and thus reconciling Christianity to political stability, against the insurrectionary (in Davis’s terms, destructive and de-formalizing) potential of a millennialism taken too literally.⁸⁹

That Augustine is aware of this potential becomes evident in his extensive attack against literal interpretations of St. John’s Revelation, particularly those literal interpretations that threaten to paganize it, to merge it with the earlier vision of the golden age:

Those who . . . got the notion that the first resurrection [of the Righteous] was to be a bodily one, were influenced in this direction mainly by the matter of the thousand years. The notion was that the saints were destined to enjoy so protracted a sabbath of repose, a holy leisure . . . when these interpreters say that the rising saints are to spend their time in limitless gormandizing with such heaps of food and drink as not only go beyond all sense of decent restraint but go utterly beyond belief, then such an interpretation becomes wholly unacceptable save to the carnal-minded. . . . To imagine that this prophecy is now being fulfilled in the thousand years of her [the city of God’s] reign . . . seems to me sheer effrontery.⁹⁰

Such literalism, Augustine was aware, effectively fused Judeo-Christian prophecy with the utopian longings expressed in the Greco-Roman traditions of the golden age and the Isle of the Blest. It was not only pagan in its origins but also potentially subversive in its social implications. Papias of Hierapolis, alleged to have been a disciple of St. John himself, is quoted in Irenaus (in the 2nd century ce) as the author of a text that clearly reanimates the prophetic, millenarian strain in Virgil’s Eclogues (37 bce) by imagining the millennium as a period when the renewed creation of God “will bring forth from the dew of heaven and the fertility of the soil an abundance of food of all kinds.” Grapes, Papias is quoted as writing, would then yield incredible amounts of fruit, while “all the animals who eat this food . . . will come to be at peace and harmony with one another,” just as in the legendary story of the golden age.⁹¹ Indeed, Lactantius, advisor on Christian religious policy to Emperor Constantine I, acknowledged, in his Institutiones Divinae (around 310 ce), something more than the fact that there were clear similarities between the pagan golden age and the prophecy of a Christ-ruled millennium on earth:

This will be a time for all those things to happen that the poets claimed for the golden age when Saturn was king. The mistake about them arises from the fact that prophets telling the future keep plenty forward like that, delivering it as if it has taken place. . . . Those outside God’s mystery . . . thought it was all stuff over and done with long before.⁹²

Lactantius’s reading is highly revealing: the myths of the golden age and the Isle of the Blest are mistaken not because they are untrue, but because they mistook prophecy for memory. The displacement of the classical Greek conception of the world as possessing neither beginning nor end by one that posited both meant that in the end times, the Messiah would restore not only creation to its blissful natural state, but also its oldest dreams to their true status as anticipations of the future rather than mythic echoes of the remote past.⁹³ Ironically, the Middle Ages will both remain indebted to Greek origins and yield very little that evokes the spirit of Plato’s Republic after Augustine’s City of God; their utopianism re-signifies the golden age traditions that Plato had repurposed in the direction of secular social engineering. Strongly reinforced by Joachim of Fiore’s 12th-century prophesies of a “third Age,” said to hold as promise the “sabbath or resting-time of mankind,” allegory and prophesy displace the Platonic organizational imaginary’s emphasis on predictive specificity and rationalist calculation.⁹⁴ In its place we now find a vision of salvation that was “collective,” “terrestrial,” “imminent,” “total,” and “miraculous.”⁹⁵ As Norman Cohn painstakingly documents, in the milieu of itinerant preachers, peasants, and artisans, utopianism shed all its links with Platonism except for the demand for a now generalized abolition of private property and wealth, frequently lending inspiration and rhetorical fuel to violent insurrections—including, most famously, the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Peasant Wars in Germany (1476–1527), and the Münster Rebellion (1534–1535; see graph 2).⁹⁶

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Graph 2. Utopian Mythemes, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

The Renaissance Utopia

Writing at the beginning of the 15th century, polymath and pioneering feminist Christine de Pizan described the foundation of her projected city by having Lady Reason invite the author’s persona to proceed as follows: “Let us go to the Field of Letters. There the City of Ladies will be founded on a flat and fertile plain, where all fruits and freshwater rivers are found and where the earth abounds in all good things.”⁹⁷ Like her two companions, Lady Rectitude and Lady Justice, the speaker is the personification of a virtue. The city of which she speaks has no territory other than the archival history of the past, wherefrom the ladies in question—its intended citizens—are to originate.⁹⁸ When it is Lady Rectitude’s turn to take up the author’s instruction, she asks her to “mix the mortar in your ink bottle so that you can fortify the City with your tempered pen.”⁹⁹ By de Pizan’s time near the end of the Middle Ages, what did not succumb to the literalist temptations of subaltern millenarianism succumbed to the moral abstractions of spiritual allegory. The City of Ladies is utopian in the sense that it is intended as the historically gleaned polity of a virtuous femininity that triumphs against the slander and invective of centuries of male misogyny; but it is also utopian in the sense that it is utterly immaterial—its only possible inhabitants are explicitly women rescued through the written records of chronicles and histories rather than the real women of de Pizan’s time.¹⁰⁰

Around a century later, however, in 1516, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, subtitled De Optimo Republicae Statu, described the “nova insula” thus:

The island contains fifty-four states, all spacious and magnificent, identical in language, traditions, customs, and laws. They are similar also in layout and everywhere, as far as the nature of the ground permits, similar even in appearance. . . . The person who knows one of their cities will know them all, since they are exactly alike insofar as the terrain permits.¹⁰¹

More’s passion for the organization of bodies, buildings, activities, and movements—a passion for organizational form—echoes Plato’s Laws, even if the element of allegorical abstraction will be preserved in a number of the Utopia’s early modern epigones, including Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602), Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666).¹⁰² But in a sense, (spatial) form in early modern utopias is already (social) content. As Phillip Wegner has argued, furthermore, the essential identity of the two constitutes an elemental aspect of the distinctive modernity of the early modern narrative utopia.¹⁰³

Utopia accordingly attains a “perfection of culture and humanity” only after King Utopus severs it from land by ordering the digging of a trench that converts it into an island.¹⁰⁴ In Christianopolis, geometry is both the principle of city planning and an object of theoretical and applied study, while political science, in turn, is grasped as applied social architecture.¹⁰⁵ And in Bacon’s Bensalem, the narrator marvels at the military orderliness of the inhabitants, which mirrors the city’s rationalized layout:

The street was wonderfully well kept: so that there was never any army had their men stand in better battle-array, than the people stood. The windows likewise were not crowded, but every one stood in them as if they had been placed.¹⁰⁶

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Figure 1. Plan of Christianopolis.

Source: From Johann Valentine Andreae, Christianopolis. Strasburg: Lazarus Zetzner, 1619. Public domain.

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Figure 2. Plan of Christianopolis.

Source: From Johann Valentine Andreae, Christianopolis. Strasburg: Lazarus Zetzner, 1619. Public domain.

In his Utopia and the Ideal Society, J. C. Davis accounts for the difference between literary utopias and the fourfold of generic directions he detects in their prehistory—Cockaygne, Arcadia, the Perfect Moral Commonwealth, and Millennium—in terms of the former’s distinct response to the fundamental tension between supply (of food, leisure, pleasure) and demand (see graph 3). In utopias, this tension is solved not on an individual but on a collective level. The concern of the utopian author is thus to “control the social problems that the collective problem can lead to.” Crime, war, violence, greed, coveting, idleness, and so on are not presumed to simply disappear. Rather, they are controlled, and utopia is accordingly a “set of strategies to maintain social order” in the face of the deficiencies of nature and the recalcitrance of human beings. Instead of wishing disharmony away, the genre is marked by the desire to “organize society and its institutions in such a way as to contain the problem’s effects.” The goal of early modern utopists, Davis concludes, is thus not really “happiness” but “order.”¹⁰⁷

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Graph 3. Genre Typology of Forms of Desirable Places and their Ideological Orientation.

To the extent that the spatial form characterizing early modern utopian fictions informs their social content, however, it needs to be rigorously historicized. Certainly, Plato’s grasp of the role of spatial arrangement for social engineering, particularly in The Laws, appears precocious, particularly given the formless, vague, or abstract qualities of imagined countries and cities in the Hellenistic, Roman, and medieval literary world. But Plato’s formalization and even mathematization of questions of social reorganization still operates under the aegis of an idealist metaphysics. By the time of the Renaissance, such idealism had received strong materialist reinforcements, particularly related to a set of preoccupations specific to the accumulation of wealth and the expansion of trade in the early capitalist world. The invention of pictorial perspective in the Italian quattrocento, gloriously translated in the utopian vision of city architecture in the triptych of strangely unpopulated urban landscapes traditionally attributed to Piero della Francesca (late 15th century), was part and parcel of a process of rationalization and abstraction that converted land into a measurable and alienable commodity, uprooting thousands from the commons and from customary tenurial relations in monastic estates.¹⁰⁸ Paradoxically, as Richard Halpern pointed out, utopias are fictions of people living “nowhere” that both react against and replicate processes of spatial parcelization and enclosure that led extensive populations into having nowhere to live.¹⁰⁹

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Figure 3. The Ideal City, Urbino, 1480s.

Source: Unknown artist (previously attributed to Piero della Francesca). Public domain.

The fact that early modern utopias respond to the capitalist transformation of land relations by making abstract, “isotropic,” homogenous, and divisible space the literal ground of political, social, and economic reform contradicts their frequent skepticism, if not outright hostility, toward the monetization of late feudal agrarian relations.¹¹⁰ More’s text banishes both private property and money from his island, though not without thereby encountering further complications and contradictions.¹¹¹ Campanella follows both More and Plato in positing a “philosophic community” where “all things are held in common,” though distribution is handled through a central administration. Neither gold nor silver “is much regarded” within Solarian society, though Solarians are aware of its value to others, while trade with foreigners is limited to simple forms of barter.¹¹² Andreae’s Christianopolis is not a republic like More’s Utopia, and it does preserve private property, but it strictly limits its provenance by forbidding the private ownership of homes, by encouraging universal work in crafts, by preserving equality in the distribution of food and necessary tools, and by using law to prioritize life over property. “Money,” the narrator tells us, though it “crushes the whole world, lies unregarded here and has no value beyond its utility,” since it cannot be privately used.¹¹³ In New Atlantis, Bacon has his Bensalemites proclaim that they are interested in trade “not for gold, silver, or jewels; nor for silks; nor for spices; nor any other commodity of matter,” but rather for “Light”—scientific knowledge.¹¹⁴ Even an explicitly pro-monarchist and pro-aristocratic text indulging in fantasies of miraculously procured wealth like Cavendish’s The Blazing World soberly concludes with the empress remarking that “much gold, and great store of riches” makes people “mad, insomuch as they endeavour to destroy each other for gold, or riches’ sake.”¹¹⁵ Born in the transition between late feudalism and early capitalism, then, early modern utopias are fundamentally distinguished by their ambivalent relationship to social transformation (the commodification of land, the expansion of trade, the creation of large populations of dispossessed peasants). They explicitly protest or resist even as they pictorially replicate such transformation.¹¹⁶ They take care to moderate, limit, or eliminate the role of private property and money in societies that are, simultaneously, strikingly “bourgeois” in cultural character: rationalized, substantially secularized, labor-intensive.¹¹⁷ After More, they will also be driven by the experimental scientific curiosity exhibited by the early bourgeoisie in its long ascendancy to economic power.¹¹⁸

The Significance of Contradiction

But contradiction furnishes the raw material of utopian fiction as well as foregrounding its irreducibility to a positivistic blueprint.¹¹⁹ The presence of such contradiction, in fact, points to the centrality of fiction and the fictional for the form of early modern utopias and, hence, their divergence not only from the “formlessness” characterizing the fourfold of medieval precedents Davis identifies but also from the expository thought experiments of Plato’s philosophical texts. This is first because in utopian fictions proper, the split between a critical or satirical portrayal of the existing world and an affirmative and celebratory portrayal of an alternative world (most extensively developed in More’s Utopia itself, with each of the two books taking up one of these functions) tends to redouble as a split between narrative and description that is effectively absent in Plato.¹²⁰ Renaissance utopias are virtually always framed by a narrative of how the narrator arrived at a utopian space from a nonutopian one and occasionally contain historical or pseudo-historical accounts of existing or imaginary countries; but they also contain extensive, quasi-anthropological descriptions of the laws, customs, political constitutions, art, religion, philosophy, and so on of utopian societies. These two modes are in tension: narrative tends to privilege change and conflict since it inherently embodies time, while description privileges timelessness instead, freezing time into space and therefore into systems of synchronic relations.¹²¹ The duality in modes complements the early modern utopia’s dual valence as both satirical critique and idealist projection and serves an accordingly dual and ambiguous function: it both connects the utopian polity to the world of historical actuality and severs it from that world (what Barthes described as “self-isolation” is virtually ubiquitous in early modern utopias).¹²²

The management of such tensions is an important motivating factor for early modern utopias’ adoption of fully fictional form, since such form allows them to both say and not say, acknowledge and disavow, reveal and hide.¹²³ Unlike the great majority of their precedents, early modern utopias frequently indulge in ironic self-awareness and self-disavowal, litotes, punning and verbal jokes, and so on.¹²⁴ More’s, Campanella’s, Andreae’s, and Bacon’s texts take care to provide mock-precise itineraries to nowhere, for instance, imitating while also manipulating the language of captains’ logs and navigation charts.¹²⁵ More uses his proficiency in Greek and Latin to create a vocabulary that either belies the existence of places, officials, or institutions in Utopian society or points to satirical directions; while Cavendish, who, like More, playfully embeds her own persona in the narrative, explicitly refers to her Blazing World as at once idly and innocently insubstantial:

My ambition is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world . . . which creation was more easily and suddenly effected than the conquests of the two famous monarchs of the world, Alexander and Caesar: neither have I made such disturbances, and caused so many dissolutions of particulars, otherwise named deaths, as they did.¹²⁶

The other side of grasping the import of contradiction for the early modern utopia, however, is less ludic than aporetic in nature. It involves the articulation of “the limits of the socially imaginable.” At first look, this is a counterintuitive claim: after all, in the Renaissance, texts are highly, and often obsessively, specific about such matters as city layout, population size, legislation, and so forth, relishing the symmetries and the distributive possibilities of number. More’s Utopia specifies not only fifty-four counties and cities, but also fewer than forty members per rural household, a phylarch (or syphogrant) for every thirty families (a total of two hundred), and six thousand households per city.¹²⁷ In Campanella, the city is divided into seven sections named after the seven planets and crossed by four avenues and four gates facing the four points of the compass, while there are six circuits of walls surrounding the central temple, which is perfectly circular.¹²⁸ In Andreae, the city is square in shape, with each side being seven hundred feet long, and is defended by four bastions, eight large towers, and sixteen smaller towers, while the four hundred craftsmen who live there are divided by their work in four primary materials; and so forth.¹²⁹

As the frequent inclusion of maps and city plans from More onward shows, there is something more than a desire for verisimilitude involved in such detail: the Renaissance polity is understood as a model, not only in the sense of a superior specimen but also in that of an exportable and reproducible template.¹³⁰ But the other side of this apparent plenitude of concrete detail is the tendency of Renaissance utopian texts to generate blind spots or gaps: Marin famously showed, for instance, that More’s city plan cannot possibly include a space for the market.¹³¹ The political organization of the island stops at the level of the city governor (princeps) and involves no central authority, despite the island’s origin in the sovereign decision of a king.¹³² Freedoms are granted but either so strictly monitored as to be annulled or else emptied of content.¹³³ Money, finally, is both abolished and present in vast quantities of stored gold and silver.¹³⁴ For Marin, such blind spots point to the genre’s inability to attain a resolution or “synthesis” of contradictions. In Jameson’s gloss, “the vocation of Utopia lies in failure.” It effectively points its readers toward what they cannot imagine. It does so “not by imagining it concretely but rather by way of the holes in the text” that mark the limits of the imagination, its inability to escape the ideological closure imposed by history itself.¹³⁵

One last historicizing and periodizing observation is necessary here: neither The Republic nor The Laws ever manages to articulate rational planning with questions pertaining to labor production and commodity consumption, distribution, and circulation. In other words, they show little interest in the political economies of the cities they imagine.¹³⁶ The medieval epigones of the golden age myth tend to ignore the economy as well, relying on principles of natural abundance and inherent human virtue, or a combination thereof. Most early modern utopias, however, are heavily preoccupied with issues of economic planning, productivity, and efficiency. More, Campanella, and Andreae are passionately invested in the thorough elimination of idleness, as well as in the proscription of forms of social parasitism like vagrancy, theft, and beggary.¹³⁷ Campanella, Andreae, Bacon, and Cavendish are all fascinated with the prospects of natural science, its usefulness for improving material life, and its potential to master and harness nature to socially determined objectives.¹³⁸ Still, none of them portrays their fictions as invested in the kind of cataclysmic social and environmental change that marked the transition to capitalism. On the contrary, they posit societies that, unlike Plato’s Kallipolis, can last in static form practically forever.¹³⁹

Notwithstanding, they inevitably grasp the conflictual nature of class relations in a far more dynamic fashion than the classical period could.¹⁴⁰ For them, the polarities of indigence and accumulation are ever-active threats to social stability, ones that need complex social mechanisms to be managed and neutralized. Nor do their concerns stop at poverty and wealth. They also worry about contradictions between town and country and between intellectual and manual labor, frequently attempting to resolve or temper them in one fashion or another.¹⁴¹ For ultimately, the humanist utopias of the Renaissance produce the utopist herself as rational subject, a social arbiter, and a guardian of the cohesion of the social bond. In a way, Margaret Cavendish’s postulate that utopia, so long as it remains “an immaterial world,” can be built entirely in “the head or scull” is here literalized: before the rise of Puritan schemes, at least, the early modern utopia is a splendid construct of the humanist mind, tending, for the most part, to stay safely insulated within its bounds.¹⁴²

Discussion of the Literature

Historically speaking, the study of literary utopias seems to begin several years after the genre had reached peak popularity in the 1880s and 1890s.¹⁴³ In the English-speaking part of the world, Lewis Mumford’s The Story of Utopias and Joyce Hertzler’s The History of Utopian Thought, two of the first critical surveys of utopian literature from antiquity to the 19th century, appeared in 1922 and 1923, respectively. By then, modernism and World War I had already irrevocably changed the cultural and ideological landscape, drastically undermining both faith in progress and technology and conventional narrative form. Utopian fictional narratives, already in decline, would never again attain the visibility and popularity they had reached at the end of the 19th century. Cognizant, at least retrospectively, of the belatedness of his project, Mumford noted in his 1962 preface that he was still at that time “living in the hopeful spirit of an earlier age,” though he was simultaneously aware that the “impetus of the great nineteenth century had come to an end” after World War I.¹⁴⁴

Mumford’s study is not short of critical insight, from the distinction between “utopias of escape” (essentially, romances) and “utopias of reconstruction” to the criticism of the instrumentalist, mechanical, and “externalist” nature of much 19th-century utopianism and—in the 1962 preface—the emphasis on the positive counterbalance of most utopias’ attempts to treat “society as a whole,” dwelling on the “interaction of work, people, and place”—a tendency he elevates to the status of a “utopian method.”¹⁴⁵ Methodologically, the approach is eclectic: although the bulk of Mumford’s book deals with literary utopias (More, Andreae, Bacon, Campanella, Hertzka, Cabet, Bellamy, Morris, and Wells, most prominently), the last three chapters pursue broader sociological and cultural questions. The case is similar with Hertzler’s study, which also blurs the boundaries between literary and nonliterary utopias, literary criticism, and sociological analysis.¹⁴⁶

Notable in Hertzler’s book is its display of fair-minded equanimity toward both the contributions and the limitations of utopian thought. This effectively disappeared from liberal approaches after World War II, particularly after the onset of the Cold War. Indeed, Mumford’s own 1962 preface testifies to his apprehension about being viewed as insufficiently critical of the “dictatorial tendencies of most classical utopias.”¹⁴⁷ Though it did not deal with literary utopias at all, Karl Popper’s two-volume The Open Society and Its Enemies, written during World War II and published in 1945, signals a shift toward ideological polarization in anglophone scholarship. The scholarship that followed in its wake in the 1950s is either markedly anti-utopian (as in Talmon and others) or highly critical of what it perceived as “authoritarian” tendencies within the tradition, as in the case of Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey through Utopia (1950), or militantly Marxist and dismissive of anti-utopian texts like those of Huxley and Orwell, like A. L. Morton’s The English Utopia (1952).¹⁴⁸ Kateb’s Utopia and Its Enemies (1963) acknowledged the prevalence of such ideological struggles, arbitrating largely in favor of utopia.¹⁴⁹

Despite their grave ideological and political differences, virtually all anglophone studies published between the early 1920s and the 1950s share a number of basic features: first, they are surveys that span centuries or even millennia of writing; second, they are not keen on theoretical distinctions between expository and narrative, nonfictional and fictional utopias, or between literary utopia and broader sociopolitical concerns with utopianism; third, they are overwhelmingly concerned with the ideational and ideological content of utopian texts; fourth, they are therefore as much literary studies as they are studies in the history of ideas and in sociology. In fact, the first signs of scholarly concern with formal and generic questions particular to or amenable to literary study did not appear in anglophone scholarship until well into the 1960s, in the work of Northrop Frye, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Robert C. Elliott. Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s monumental Utopian Thought in the Western World, originally published in 1979, is perhaps the towering achievement of this tradition.¹⁵⁰

Elsewhere in the Western world, different methodological directions emerge. In Germany, Ernst Bloch published his Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia) in 1918, before both Mumford and Hertzler. Written in a highly philosophical, speculative, and often esoteric language, Bloch’s early study in what he called “revolutionary romanticism” eschewed both the mode of the survey and the study of specific literary texts (it rather opted for music instead). It remains important, however, because it is here that Bloch first develops the notions of the Not Yet and of utopian anticipation that would be taken up again—alongside concepts like the utopian impulse or the front, novum, ultimum, and horizon and conceptual distinctions like these between “daydream” and “night-dream” or “abstract” and “concrete” utopia—in his magnum opus, the three-volume Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, 1954–1959).¹⁵¹ The German-language tributary also includes the contributions of Walter Benjamin on the intersections between theology and radical politics, particularly his preoccupation with messianic redemption in texts like “Critique of Violence” (1921) and “On the Concept of History” (1940)¹⁵²; Karl Mannheim’s sociological discussion of the relationship between the concepts of utopia and ideology (1929)¹⁵³; T. W. Adorno’s investigations of utopia as conceived through the prism of “negative dialectics”¹⁵⁴; Herbert Marcuse’s rehabilitation of utopian desire against the consumer society’s “affirmative culture” and “repressive desublimation” in works from Eros and Civilization (1955) to Negations (1968)¹⁵⁵; and Jack Zipes’s work in a direction already explicit in Bloch, that of the utopian valences of the fairy tale.¹⁵⁶ The confluence of the streams of US-based genre theory and criticism exemplified by Frye, Sargent, and Elliott, on the one hand, and the German philosophical and speculative strains in Bloch (as well as the vigorously materialist ones in Brecht) on the other can then be said to have produced Darko Suvin’s innovative work on the novum, cognitive estrangement, and utopian science fiction that energized the field when he began to publish in English in the early 1970s (he continues to do so in the early 21st century).¹⁵⁷

Around the same time, in 1971, Roland Barthes’s Sade/Fourier/Loyola inaugurated what we might see as a third and final tributary for the formation of the scholarly study of utopian literature, namely that of French structuralism and semiotics, while challenging the efficacy of generic taxonomies through its bold comparative and cross-generic approach. It was quickly followed by Louis Marin’s Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces (1973), whose long first section on Thomas More’s Utopia delves deeply into the formal and structural play involved in More’s text while exploring the work of what he calls utopic “neutralization,” as well as the implications of his view of utopia as an “ideological critique of ideology.”¹⁵⁸ During the same year, Miguel Abensour defended his doctoral thesis on socialist utopias (most prominently, William Morris), which would generate the equally seminal—at least for left-wing utopianism—notion of utopia as an “education of desire.”¹⁵⁹

By the mid-1970s, all three tributaries or traditions had begun to merge, particularly within the North American scholarly community. Their mixing was powerful and generative: Tom Moylan, who offers one of the most in-depth expositions of the topic, remarks that the institutional growth of utopian studies coincided with the emergence of a new wave of utopian fictions (which he terms “critical utopias”). They entered North American culture “along separate avenues in the late 1960s and early 1970s” and almost immediately converged “in the new cultural, intellectual, and political counter-space” of the era.¹⁶⁰ Moylan likewise discerns a third factor within this mix of tributaries within the scholarly paradigm and of scholarly and creative endeavors: Fredric Jameson, in whose voluminous and far-reaching work utopia emerges as a theoretical preoccupation at least as early as 1971 (in Marxism and Form) and has since remained a permanent device of critical orientation.

Jameson’s contributions are exemplary, not least for their ability to organically combine and bring to bear on the study of utopian literature all three methodological paradigms (as well as the methodological foci of form, content, and function identified by Ruth Levitas): anglophone genre criticism and theory (Frye, Moylan, Fitting, Wegner), German critical theory and philosophy (Bloch, Adorno, Marcuse), and French structuralism and semiotics (Barthes, Genette, Marin).¹⁶¹ His revisiting of the questions of ideology and utopia as well as that of “narrative containment”; his contributions to the study of the utopian science fiction of the 1970s and to the question of the paradoxes of the utopian imagination; his high-impact incorporation of Marin’s contribution in conjunction with Greimasian semiotics; his explorations of utopia, ontology, and alternative modernisms; and the grand theoretical synthesis embodied in his Archaeologies of the Future have all played a central role in the shaping of the literary study of utopia as a scholarly endeavor for at least five decades.¹⁶² His intellectual legacy has also informed the contributions of Phillip E. Wegner, who has worked prodigiously to expand the uses of the analytical arsenal of Greimasian semiotics and the possibilities inherent in the concept of periodization (particularly as regards intergeneric relations), as well as to bring utopian studies into dialogue with contemporary cultural studies, particularly the study of mass culture texts.¹⁶³

Finally, and regarding the chronological span of the primary texts covered in the present article: though classical, Roman, Hellenistic, and medieval utopianism remains comparatively understudied and often confined to brief surveys to this day (works by Dawson, Schofield, Bobonich, Evans, Lochrie, and Verini cited in the text and in the Further Reading section are important exceptions), early modern utopianism has attracted formally sophisticated and historically nuanced analyses by a host of literary critics. Among them, the contributions of Stephen Greenblatt, J. C. Davis, James Holstun, Richard Halpern, Christopher Kendrick, Jeffrey Knapp, Denise Albanese, Crystal Bartolovich, Phillip E. Wegner, and Sarah Hogan have been particularly influential and prominent.¹⁶⁴