Giving Utopia Its Due
Thomas More’s Utopia (1518). Photograph: The Granger Collection, New York
When we use the word “utopian” today, we usually mean it pejoratively—to chastise idealism or to condemn some plan as unpracticable. Or we aim it at the past, which through disaster after disaster shows the dangers of veering from what everyone knows is good, sound common sense. The word “utopian” seems to belong most properly in a rebuke by a stern parent.
This if-wishes-were-horses ring was in a sense built into the word “utopia” from early in its history. Its origin as the title of Thomas More’s 1516 book makes it one of the most consciously considered and articulated concepts in the European languages: most concepts develop through varied linguistic use over generations before writers opportunistically snatch them up and rivet them to definitions; “utopia” was born as the title of a treatise dedicated to defining it. Over the next three centuries, “the utopia” would flourish as a distinct literary form, More’s founding model always hovering over its many experimentations. But More’s Utopia was published one year before Martin Luther posted his Theses, and the ensuing tumult sent the utopian spirit More had unleashed quickly back into hiding (and More himself to martyrdom). Frank and Fritzie Manuel, in their monumental study Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979), describe the conditions of this hibernation:
Before the schism of the Reformation, Christian humanists were beset by doubts, conflicting beliefs, opposing loyalties. And they were candid enough to express their misgivings and their ambivalences, to deliver themselves of paradoxes, to say something and then partially retract it, to examine the potentialities of an idea without totally embracing it, to call attention to a present evil by proposing an outrageous remedy like the Utopia and then withdrawing from its advocacy. All of this, of course, was possible only before the great upheaval. When Luther’s breach became final and the whole politico-religious atmosphere was saturated with mistrust, intolerance, and hatred, More’s view of the world was radically altered, and so was the meaning of Utopia . . . The playful days were over; one did not toy with utopias while Christendom was being torn asunder.
“Not now!” said mom and dad. From its very semantic origins, “utopia” has named a daring spirit wrong for its times, a forward thrust of possibility quickly turned back by the iron walls of reality.
But utopianism did eventually advance in and through Europe’s century-and-a-half of Reformation, counterreformation, and religious war, both as a literary form and, more abstractly, as a new inventiveness and openness to experimentation in the ordering of society. While More had taken his stand with the Roman Church (despite his many criticisms of it, which in fact motivate much of Utopia), this new utopianism in practice thrived in the pluralizing and questioning atmosphere of the radical Protestant sects. The anabaptists of Munster who followed John of Leiden, the citizens of Calvin’s brutal Geneva, and the English Puritans who sailed to found their “city on a hill”—all incarnated a new political utopianism motivated by religious fervor.
Charles Fourier by Jean Gigoux
A final notable stage in the historical development of “the utopian” that still informs our sense of the word came with the nineteenth-century trio often called the “socialist utopians”: Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen. All three were dreamers and social improvers who, like the radical sects of the seventeenth century, sought to reshape society through human effort. Unlike their forbears, though, the nineteenth-century utopians’ guidance came not from their interpretation of Scripture but from what they took to be reason—society should be ordered not for the glorification of God but for the service of material human needs.
A drawing of Fourier’s planned phalanstère
I think that ends the story of a certain positive, upward development in the meaning of this word we still use. The nineteenth-century utopians mark a kind of early adulthood of the impulse Thomas More named and christened, before “the playful days” ended again. For what became of this utopian ambition—of Robert Owen’s far too great optimism in the individual’s perfectibility given the right environment, of Fourier’s insistence that society should be built around desire, of Saint-Simon’s faith in the capacity of large industry to solve society’s biggest problems? What resulted from applying utopian tenacity to the improvement of society? The twentieth century resulted, with its industrial wars, its death camps, its enormous and fruitless uprootings of peoples for the sake of ideas. It is not that Fourier, Owen, and Saint-Simon themselves failed in their aims—whether they did so or not depends on how we understand those aims, a complicated question. Rather they bear the mark of failure because we see them retrospectively as standing at the threshold of an age—what Eric Hobsbawm called “the Age of Extremes”—whose mistakes our whole ideological formation today is designed to prevent us from repeating. When we hear or utter the word “utopian,” it conjures a whole array of dimly-lit images and half-forgotten maxims, implanted within us largely in grade school social studies and literature classes, with the same message: if you try to change society too much or too quickly, bad things will happen. In fact, more specifically, we now automatically associate the utopian with the dystopian, a tired and overemphasized staple of high school literature curricula, in the English-speaking world at least. Orwell, Huxley, and Golding growl like the three heads of Cerberus at the closed gate to utopia.
I worry that in so jadedly allowing the word “utopia” to slip into this kind of semantic afterlife—to become a word, like “Facebook,” which only a past generation could have used joyfully—we risk a grievous pretentiousness. We allow ourselves, by scorning utopia, to feel as if we live in a world already complete: that world is far from perfect, but history has proven its flaws to be permanent, and it will punish us if we refuse to accept them.
I think that view, like most self-serving overgeneralizations, rests on a misapprehension of history that usually functions behind language without being directly acknowledged or scrutinized. It defines the utopian too narrowly and blames it too much for disasters with much more specific causes. What Ernst Bloch called “the spirit of utopia” lies behind both the good and the bad in modernity and was essential to the development of the modern ideological world. The conceit of utopia allowed Thomas More to develop a shockingly modern social analytic of England at the turn of the sixteenth century—the substance of Utopia Book I, which barely mentions the island of King Utopus—wherein he famously criticizes the country’s regime of criminalizing poverty and its practices of land expropriation and enclosure, a discussion Karl Marx referenced while considering “so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital, Vol. 1. Utopia comes as near to a modern sociological class analysis as it could have in the early sixteenth century, when the concept of socioeconomic class did not exist; it qualifies More as a pioneer of modern political thought.
The Protestant sects of the following century, meanwhile, though their bodies-politic often rested on a severely enforced public morality that tends to repulse us later moderns, did the dirty work of the later liberal revolutions in establishing sovereign republics with no connection to historically grounded kingdoms. They were among the first modern Europeans to systematically try out a social contract—to found a new sovereignty in a shared principle of community rather than in force, intimidation, or tradition. The ideas of both Locke and Rousseau have deep roots in the sermons and pamphlets of the radical Protestant agitators who populated the vacuum of censorship opened by the English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century.
Henri de Saint-Simon
The nineteenth-century Utopians, while the present likes to dismiss them as eccentrics, exerted influence far beyond their writings, especially Owen and Saint-Simon. Owen had thousands of followers all over Europe, personally impacted Jeremy Bentham’s thought, and among his many reformist efforts joined forces with MP and eventual Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel to pass the first Factory Act in 1819. Owenites principally authored the 1838 People’s Charter, the central rallying point of English working-class political struggle for the next two decades, which called for universal manhood suffrage and the end of property qualifications for Parliament, among other demands which would eventually be met. Saint-Simon fought in the American Revolution, consorted with Talleyrand, co-authored a book with the historian Augustin Thierry, and employed and mentored the young Auguste Comte. He also led a bizarre and cult-like band which pioneered modern canal-building and produced numerous individuals who contributed to the development of large-scale industry. More generally (and we can happily again include Fourier in this judgment, since he did much to frame what the nineteenth century knew as “the social question”), they contributed much to the popular ferment of discussion at a time when the issues of the day urgently concerned the long-term future of world political and economic development—when capitalism, colonialism, and modern constitutional government were remaking the world. Fourier, Owen, and Saint-Simon together exercised an enormous and direct influence on the formations of both liberalism and socialism, the two broad political ideologies which have most impacted the world since.
Civitas Veri, or City of Truth, by Bartolomeo Del Bene
Abjuring the legacy of utopianism entails a rejection of more than we might at first realize. It distances us not just from adolescent dreaming but from one of the prime affective and intellectual forces motivating such modern ideals as popular sovereignty, human rights, and social progress. We probably do need to reconsider such fundamental modern ideals today, but we should not try to do so without attending to their utopian aspect.
Dr. Daniel Cunningham is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Villanova University. He specializes in political philosophy and philosophy of history.