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During the Renaissance, utopias existed outside known and mappable space as well as beyond known historical time. They were thus doubly removed from the historical, evolving world, instead constituting static models of a better world to which no transition appeared practicably possible. With the publication of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’an 2440 in 1771, a drastic change occurs: utopia is henceforth transformed from an unreachable space existing in an insular time to the known world as it has evolved in the future. The “temporalization of utopia,” as it is known, depends on the rise and eventual hegemony, during the pre-revolutionary Enlightenment and in the first years after the American and French Revolutions, of ideas regarding social, institutional, moral and scientific progress as an active principle of history. Though Enlightenment thought is by no means either homogeneous or lacking in skepticism regarding the factuality of progress or the imminence of utopia, the writings of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and, far more unambiguously, those of the Marquis of Condorcet, testify to a growing degree of confidence in the dynamic and evolutionary nature of historical development and, ultimately, in the prospects for infinite perfectibility—in other words, in the ontological openness of time and history. Mercier’s paradigm-shifting novel emerges on the ground of such ideological shifts but also betrays the existence of significant ambiguities in the Enlightenment’s philosophical legacy, since it both foregrounds and denies the connection between future progress and political revolution, presenting its reader with often contradictory content and an internally divided form. Ironically, the very growth of confidence in the imminence of utopia entailed, by the early 19th century, a rejection of narrative fiction among the three most prominent utopists of the period: Henri Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier. Their shared belief in the practical applicability of their schemes marks a clear departure from the playful or aporetic character of utopian fictions in the Renaissance and heralds the rise to dominance of system-building blueprints. A distrust of the political sphere, construed as one of violent antagonism among classes and group interests, as well as an emphasis on devising ways through which the social sphere can be harmonized in the interests of shared prosperity and happiness, is characteristic of all three thinkers, as is a cosmopolitan spirit and an aversion to nationalist chauvinisms. Naturally, differences are also present among them. Saint-Simon privileges the role of scientific specialists, manufacturers, and merchants in securing rule by the productive classes and the waning of both economic parasitism and political violence in the future. Owen emphasizes the role of education in reforming social mores and sees experimental communities founded on his teaching of new and rational principles as capable of instituting “an entirely new state of society” that can be emulated internationally. Fourier, meanwhile, focuses his energy on devising methods for reconciling the conflictual personalities and passions of individuals with social harmony, and for harmonizing pleasure and social regulation, freedom and organization. The narrative utopia would return after the hopes of the utopian system-builders of the early 19th century and their followers were disappointed through a combination of internecine conflict, the economic failure or repression of the social experiments inspired by their writings, and the rise of working-class militancy, particularly in France, Britain, and Prussia. Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840) can be faulted for both aesthetic failure and rather repressive emphases on homogeneity, discipline, surveillance, and a retrogressive conception of gender relations, but it also contains the seeds of fairly important innovations, among which the most important for later developments in the genre are its sophisticated mode of braiding together the temporal horizons of history and utopia, its engagement with the occasional inevitability of revolution and of revolutionary violence, its concurrent attentiveness to the importance of the political moment of crisis, its developed exploration of the complexities of revolutionary transition, and, finally, its accommodation, despite its otherwise doctrinaire spirit, of a degree of open-ended dialogism which utopian fiction had not enjoyed since More’s founding text.

From its earliest beginnings in the Western world to the end of the Renaissance, utopian literature has developed in four primary ways: as myth about the blissful but vanished past of humanity; as prophecy about a future state of bliss, particularly in millennial visions of the post-apocalyptic kingdom of God; as explicitly posited philosophical and rationalist speculation on how an ideal or at least plausibly better city and society could be attained; and as full-blown fiction, which deploys a range of fictional speech acts. Though in certain ways its ideational origins lie in a rich interplay of topoi derived from mythic antiquity and from the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian cultural world, utopian literature in its most formally complex form—that of the utopian fiction—only arises in the Renaissance. In this form, which will ultimately yield the utopian novel of the 19th century, the literary utopia occupies an idiosyncratic position between realism and fantasy fiction, lacking grounding in verisimilar space or time, but also eschewing the ahistoricism and escapism of fantasy. Utopian literature has been mostly understood in terms of moral and sociological functions, ranging from its utility as an instrument of anticipation, or at least fertile speculation about the possible and desirable, to its ability to posit norms and regulatory ideals or, more negatively, its penchant for dogmatism and the abstractions of blueprint and method. A different picture emerges, however, if one considers utopias from the standpoint of how they produce social meaning—an approach that foregrounds the role of textual and semiotic factors without making ethical assumptions about the better or worse character of utopian textual worlds. At stake, rather, is the grasp of utopian literature in terms of an organizational imaginary, according to which society is something that can be beneficially re-formed and rearranged after first being critically analyzed as to its constitutive elements and institutions. At their earliest, utopias were the repository of myths about a world free from the pains of labor and the horrors of war, from greed and often from private property as well. By the time of Plato’s philosophical writings in the 4th century bce, utopian vision had become at once more modest and more realistic and technical, most prominently in its connection to social engineering. The earliest elements of playful fictionality emerge in the Hellenistic world, which incorporates the theme of travel and the element of the marvelous, often in a satirical vein. The early Christian world tends toward a divide between allegorical abstraction, particularly in elite versions of Christian Neoplatonism, and the more heterodox possibilities of divinely mediated subversion of established social forms and structures in the millenarianism of the lower classes. The Renaissance utopia, finally, emerges after Sir Thomas More’s homonymous text of 1516 as a complex synthesis and mediation between elite and subaltern pursuits, antiquity and modernity, Christian morality and scientific materialism, constituting utopists themselves as mediators and guarantors of social harmony in an otherwise rapidly changing and turbulent world.