Political Theories for Students

OVERVIEW

From the writings of ancient Greece to the most recent films of Hollywood, people have tried to imagine how the ideal community might look. Each description of the perfect state not only expresses the hopes of the author, but also carries with it an implied criticism of current systems. As analyses of the imperfections of contemporary governments and explorations of the possibilities for future systems, utopianism has led to reform, revolution, and a number of experimental communities designed to test models of ideal states. Cultures all over the world from the classical age to the present, from Jewish and Christian and Moslem traditions, have produced utopias. Most utopian literature and community experimentation, however, is associated with the West. Utopias and their alter egos, dystopias, reflect not only specific concerns about how governments and people interact, but also an overarching hope that change can make institutions and individuals better.

Utopianism

WHO CONTROLS GOVERNMENT? State supported by the

people

HOW IS GOVERNMENT PUT INTO POWER? Cooperative

founded by dissatisfied group

WHAT ROLES DO THE PEOPLE HAVE? Tolerate

differences; conform if needed

WHO CONTROLS PRODUCTION OF GOODS? The people,

managed by state

WHO CONTROLS DISTRIBUTION OF GOODS? The people,

managed by state

MAJOR FIGURES Sir Thomas More; Robert Owen

HISTORICAL EXAMPLE The Farm

HISTORY

The word utopia first appeared in Thomas More’s (1478–1535) book of the same name, published in 1516. More coined the term by combining the Greek words for “not” (ou) and “place” (topos), thus creating a word that meant “nowhere.” This name captured the essence of More’s endeavor. He wished to describe

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CHRONOLOGY

c. 360 B.C.: Plato completes his Republic, the first true utopian work.

1516: Thomas More coins the term “utopia” in his book of the same name.

1623: Tommaso Campanella completes City of the Sun.

1656: James Harrington completes his Commonwealth of Oceana.

1776: Ann Lee founds a Shaker settlement in Watervliet, near Albany, New York.

1825: Robert Owen founds an experimental cooperative society in New Harmony, Indiana.

1841: John Humphrey Noyes founds the socialist Oneida Community in Putney, Vermont.

1844: Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, becomes a Fourierist phalanx.

1888: Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, appears.

1932: Aldous Huxley completes Brave New World and launches the era of the dystopia.

1971: Stephen Gaskin and 320 self–described San Francisco “hippies” create The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee.

1974: Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia

appears.

in detail a place that did not exist, that was located in no physical spot—but that might be, and could be, and should, represent the ideal place to which every real location might aspire. Utopia could be found only in the imagination, in the mind’s eye.

Although the word originated with More, the idea of utopia wasn’t new. The first precursors of the utopian thinkers were known as prophets. They criticized contemporary culture, its excesses and inequalities, and contrasted what existed to what might one day be—the end of oppression, the reign of peace, and the unity of people across every conceivable economic and social boundary. One of the earliest of these utopian thinkers was Amos. Born in the eighth cen-

tury B.C., Amos was a shepherd and fruit gatherer, and he railed against the corruption of the elite classes in Israel and their misuse of honest laborers. According to the Torah and Old Testament, he predicted that the aristocracies such as the one in Israel would fall and the bounty of the lands would rest in the hands of the honest and faithful Jews. His message was two–fold: religious and ethical. Only those of the right faith and lifestyle would reap the benefits of a golden age.

Similar thinkers followed, such as Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekial. Perhaps most noteworthy was the Israeli courtier/councilor of the late 700s B.C., Isaiah. Like those who had come before him, Isaiah denounced the corruption of the ruling class and the emptiness of most religious practice, predicting the fall of the current system and the preservation of a faithful, moral few. He then described the peaceful kingdom that would follow; according to Isaiah 2:4 in the Revised Standard Version of the Old Testament, the people “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

These early prophets paved the way for a tradition of religious thinkers who described utopias marked by love, service, humility, and worship of a common deity. In the first century A.D., according to the New Testament, Jesus spoke of a Kingdom of God on Earth. Augustine (354–430 A.D.) wrote about a City of God, and Savonarola (1452–1498) preached of an ideal theocratic state. Some of these Judeo–Christian thinkers believed the perfect world they described would come to pass; others described the ideal land as an exercise to show what areas of their system needed to be changed. Other spiritual traditions such as Taoism, Theraveda Buddhism, and medieval Islam also had their own comparable precursors to utopianism as well. Both kinds of thinkers, those who foresaw a literal paradise and those who used it as a foil for their own era, led the way for later forms of religious utopian thought and action.

Plato and the Utopian Republic

The golden age of Greece provided the first real utopian work in the form of Plato’s (428–348 B.C.) Republic. Written in the fourth century B.C., The Republic was a political work meant not only to sketch out an ideal form of government, but, in doing so, to highlight the problems Plato saw in contemporary Greece. Plato’s solution for the inequalities of wealth and status was a state in which wealth was evenly distributed and individuals were divided into three groups: artisans; warriors; and the guardians, the spe-

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BIOGRAPHY:

Plato

The author of the first true work of utopianism, The Republic, is also one of the most influential philosophers in history. In 407 B.C., Plato became the student and friend of the most visible and controversial Greek thinker of the day, Socrates. Eight years later, Socrates was convicted of corrupting youth and teaching religious heresies; he was given poisonous hemlock to drink for his execution. The death of Socrates affected Plato deeply; Plato wrote many of his works as dialogues, such as the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedro, among others, and in these the former student cast the late Socrates in a key role as the champion voice of reason. Plato lived at the court of Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse for a time and then returned to Athens to found the Academy, where he taught philosophy and mathematics until his death.

Plato’s earliest written works described the ideas of Socrates regarding virtue, knowledge, and happiness. As Plato’s own ideas matured, his writings focused on the questions of how to know and how to live. He believed the universe possessed its own internal harmony, and he wanted to build a philosophical scheme that paralleled and explained the rationality of the universe. This led him to the notion of ideal

forms. Ideas, he argued, were independently real, regardless of correspondence to objects we can see. Likewise, every object, every thing, corresponded to an ideal form of that thing, far more real than the fleeting existence of the object in our realm. For example, according to Plato, a chair is but a shadow of the Ideal Chair that embodies true Chairness in the realm of ideas.

If what we see in the temporal realm is an anemic copy of the ideal form of an object or system, then what does that ideal form look like? Plato penned his Republic in the effort to explain what the ideal form of a government—in other words, utopia—might look like. He tried to systematize the state as a mirror of the harmony that he believed existed somewhere else. In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” he compared the realm of ideas to a sunlit world that threw shadows on the wall of a dark cave; those chained in the cave saw only the shadows and believed that these shadows represented the real world, rather than a pale comparison of it. In his Republic, Plato tried to turn away from the shadows on the cave wall and see the real community in the sunlight. The product was the very first work of utopian political theory.

cial leadership class trained from childhood to rule. In short, Plato advocated an aristocratic communism to guide the life of a Republic.

Plato’s Republic not only offered the first classic blueprint of a political utopia, but it also delved into the issue of the ideal personal life. This included the issues of sexual relations and parenthood. Though Plato afforded women more opportunities in his Republic than they had at the time in Greece, he expected men to comprise the guardian class, and even indicated that they should hold wives in common—as well as children, who would be raised apart from their biological parents. He even suggested such a group family would allow experimentation with selective breeding to take place to create the best leaders possible. Plato’s concern not only with public structures but also with personal issues such as the family opened the door for future utopian thinkers to address the relationships between men, women, and children in their plans for the ideal world.

After Plato’s Republic, many centuries passed before the next true utopian work, Thomas More’s Utopia, appeared. The tendency to criticize contemporary ways of life and suggest better ones did not hibernate during this time, however. Philosophers, statesmen, religious leaders, and poets all noted their concerns for their political and social systems and their dreams for paradise. For example, classic Roman figures such as Virgil, Seneca, Tacitus, and Juvenal all complained of injustices and inequalities and longed for a natural, simple state that provided justice and plenty for all citizens. Augustine’s City of God (approximately 412 A.D.) used the fall of Rome as a springboard for religious utopianism in the tradition of the early Jewish prophets.

By the Middle Ages, thinkers took the classical preoccupation with a “natural state” a step further and tried to determine what the state of nature looked like for humankind. John Wycliffe (c. 1328–1384), a British church and political leader, believed that the

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Bronze bust sculpture of Plato. (The Library of Congress)

state of nature was communist in form, with all property held in common. John Ball (?–1381) agreed, and the social reformer took part in the radical Peasant Revolt in England before he was excommunicated by the church and drawn and quartered by the crown. His example moved utopian thought from the realm of ideas to the realm of action, and led the way for future utopians to try to put their visions of the ideal world into practice. The writings of Wycliffe and Ball later influenced William Morris, who named his work of socialist utopianism The Dream of John Ball (1888).

More Coins a Vision

More’s Utopia (1516) launched a new literary genre and gave a name to it as well. More wrote the story as if its central character, sailor Raphael Hythloday, were real and had visited an actual, physical place called Utopia. At the time, so–called travel narratives of explorers’ journeys were a popular form of literature. More therefore based his fictional account on the popular non–fictional works of the day, turning the travel narrative on its head to speak about what could be instead of what was. Hythloday’s experience discovering the land, its people, and its systems, though fictional, made key points about labor, justice, education, and religion in society. The Utopians believed the goal of life was happiness, but they recognized that true happiness came from moderate and worthy ac-

tivities such as work and study, and not false pleasures such as excessive wealth or empty status. Framing the critique and challenge within a fantastical story gave More greater philosophical freedom than if he had written a book criticizing his king and country.

More’s book sprung from the humanist tradition of the era, which celebrated the human capacities of reason and rationality, and urged individuals to contemplate truth to better themselves inside and out. More inspired a series of others to write similar works describing imaginary paradises, their systems, and the types of people who could maintain them. These sixteenth– and seventeenth–century European utopias harnessed the new methods of the Scientific Revolution as well as the new theologies of the Reformation to examine the nature of the good life and the perfect state. François Rabelais’ description of the Abbey of Thélème in Gargantua (1532), Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (approximately 1602), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), and James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), among others, followed from the example of More’s Utopia.

Political theory of the era had a direct impact on the utopias produced during the time. Theorists such as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and John Locke (1632–1704), for example, wrote extensively about two particular ideas: the social contract and natural law. The social contract was a shorthand way of describing the mutual duties and responsibilities of the government and the governed. The consent of the governed, or the citizens, legitimized the authority of the government. This consent was based on an understanding of what the government would do for the governed, and, likewise, what the citizens owed in terms of obedience to the state. This implied contract could be broken if one side failed to live up to expectations, however; for example, if the citizens agreed to place themselves under a particular government so it could protect their lives and property, and in turn it abused the citizens’ rights and property, then the contract was broken, and the citizens had the right to revolt against the state. The idea of the social contract influenced a number of utopian visions, particularly among the experimental communities.

Natural Law Theory

Likewise, natural law theory also influenced the formation of utopian works and experiments. Natural law theory looked back to an earlier time—literal or metaphorical—before the development of so–called civilization to imagine how the earliest humans ordered themselves into societies. Some theorists such

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as Thomas Hobbes believed that humans in nature were violent, greedy, and irrational, and the state had to set up mechanisms to control the base instincts of its citizens. In contrast, philosophers like John Locke believed that human nature allowed for peaceful, cooperative relationships between individuals, and the state’s chief responsibility was to try to maintain the freedom that would allow individuals to recapture this state of nature again. Utopians fell on both sides of the issue, but more tended to agree with Locke’s more optimistic assessment of the natural law. As a result, many utopias described populations as natural, untouched, or uncorrupted by civilization, enjoying life in an Eden–like atmosphere.

Social contract theory and natural law theory helped to usher in a new era in the West. The era of revolutions—namely the American War of Independence (1775–1783) and the French Revolution (1789–1799)—and the theorists who helped to inspire them led to a new wave of utopian thinkers and works, especially in France. Utopian socialists and political reformers/revolutionaries such as François Noel Babeuf (1764–1797), Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), Comte Henri de Saint–Simon (1760–1825), and Pierre–Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) not only wrote, but also worked to make their views become reality. Their combination of agitation and activism led to a new era in utopian thought; not only would utopians write about their views, but they would develop communities in which their ideas could be put into practice, showcases for their theories in action. Although utopian thought existed and exists throughout the world, the West, and in particular the United States, offer strikingly vivid examples of utopian communities in action.

Ann Lee and the Shakers

Ann Lee (1736–1784), also known as Ann the Word or Mother Ann, was the chief leader of the Shakers, a Christian sect that broke away from the Quakers and developed utopian communities based on their unique theology. The Shaker movement, also known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or the Millennial Church, began with a Quaker revival in England in 1747 and grew under the initial leadership of James and Jane Wardley. Ann Lee, however, took the group from England to the United States and established an exclusive, utopian Shaker settlement.

Lee came from humble beginnings in Manchester, England. Illiterate and poor, Lee worked in cotton factories and as a cook. She married blacksmith Abraham Stanley in 1762. In approximately 1770, Lee

claimed to have a vision that changed her life and the lives of many others forever. She said she received a revelation that the Second Coming of Christ had taken place within her; she was the embodiment of the holy on earth, the female incarnation of God who fulfilled Her role as mother just as Jesus had suggested God’s fatherhood. This vision, along with the abilities she claimed such as speaking in tongues and performing miracles, gave Lee authority not only as a religious leader but as a divine figure as well.

The teachings of Lee, however, included the complete equality of the sexes and the holiness of celibacy, and both ideas seemed radical to the eighteenth–cen- tury English mainstream. She was even imprisoned for a time for her beliefs. Eventually, Lee realized that the Shakers had to find a way to pursue freely the ideal community. She decided to follow a vision and take a faithful few to North America and begin a Shaker colony there. In 1776, she founded Watervliet, near Albany, New York. After her death in 1784, the Shaker impulse toward building utopian colonies continued to grow. By 1826, there were eighteen American Shaker communities in a total of eight states, each organized into groups, or families, of thirty to ninety people who owned property communally.

Lee is an important figure for organizing the first Shaker communities, as well as for emphasizing gender equality in a utopian setting. Her message had staying power: the Shakers outlived Lee by more than 230 years—unusual for a group that practiced celibacy. Though Shaker communities are all but extinct today, their vision of balance, simplicity, and equality in the ideal world survives through their signature architecture, furniture, and crafts.

Charles Fourier

One of the first theorists to inspire communities based on his utopian thought was Charles Fourier (1772–1837), known as the father of utopian socialism, the most visible French utopian thinker, and the inspiration for a series of celebrated experimental utopian communities. Many of his concerns about the mechanization, dehumanization, and class schism of society previewed concerns later raised by critics of the Industrial Revolution. His belief in channeling humans’ natural passions to achieve social harmony, and the practical means he suggested for achieving it, became known as Fourierism.

Unlike communist utopians, who believed the state needed to own all means of production in the economy, Fourier accepted a few of the tenets of capitalism, including some private property ownership. He simply wanted a well–ordered agricultural society,

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Lithograph of Charles Fourier. (The Library of Congress)

one based on cooperation and gender equality. Fourier devised with almost mathematical precision his plan for achieving harmony: the phalanx, an economic unit of 1,620 people who divided labor among themselves according to ability. He wrote and spoke about his blueprint for utopia, and followers and newspapers responded enthusiastically.

The Frenchman Fourier believed that natural human passions could be channeled to create social harmony. His prescription for this endeavor was quite specific: he believed the phalanx worked best to produce an organized, agricultural society. His teachings spread from France to the United States and resulted in The Society for the Propagation and Realization of the Theory of Fourier. Dozens of Fourierist communities developed according to the blueprint of the writer, including the highly visible Brook Farm.

Unfortunately, Fourier did not live to see his ideas applied in real settings. After his death, adherents such as Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley transplanted Fourierism to the United States and in 1843 founded Phalanx, New Jersey, the first of almost thirty experimental communities based on Fourier’s vision. Christian, but nonsectarian, these colonies organized themselves as cooperatives with equalized wages and supported themselves by the work of members and money from non–resident stockholders. The communities encouraged traditional values such as

monogamy and family, but also encouraged gender equality—several directors or presidents of Fourierist communities, in fact, were women.

The most successful symbol of Fourierism was Brook Farm, an experimental community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The community began in 1841 as a Unitarian venture but converted to a Fourierist phalanx in 1844. Brook Farm gained international celebrity status due to its membership, which included some of the era’s intellectual elite, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Orestes Brownson. The Fourierist newspaper Harbinger began publication at Brook Farm as well. After the central building was destroyed by fire, the colony fell into economic hardship and eventually disbanded. Its fame lived on, however, in the works and lives of its former members.

Later Utopian Idealists

Other communities based on the political theories of utopian writers followed. Robert Owen (1801– 1877) founded a cooperative rather than communist society in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825. Among New Harmony’s historical contributions were the first trade school, kindergarten, public school, and free library in the United States. John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886) believed Fourier had highlighted real problems in contemporary systems, but Noyes disagreed with Fourier’s conclusions about how to solve them. Noyes advocated the blend of religion and politics, arguing that socialism could not work without institutionalized faith, and a “complex marriage” that offered a form of polygamy and sharing of children in common. He founded the Oneida Community in Putney, Vermont, in 1841.

At the same time theorists were experimenting with communities that put their ideas into practice, religious groups established their own societies for the free exercise of their faiths. Between 1663, when Dutch Mennonites created a communitarian colony in the Delaware of today, until 1858, approximately 138 separate religious communities sprang up in North America. German Pietists, Shakers, and Hutterites, among others, founded long–lived towns and communities, some of which still exist today. However, the U.S. Civil War tore apart the fabric of the nation and brought a halt to the community–building impulse of the utopian movement. Few other utopian experiments took place.

By the time of the Industrial Revolution, utopian literature across the West began to resemble More’s Utopia once again; works like Laurence Gronlund’s

The Coöperative Commonwealth (1884), Edward Bel-

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lamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1891), William Morris’s News From Nowhere, and H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905) described worlds that could be—often with solutions to the problems of labor, mechanization, overcrowding, and income that seemed to arrive hand–in–hand with a more urban and industrialized society. The reliance on science and economics typified these turn–of–the–century utopias.

The Dystopia

The twentieth–century experience with two world wars and a Cold War led to a new literary subgenre: the dystopia. Just as theorists wrote utopias to prove how good things could be if they were changed, authors of dystopias warned of how bad things could be if they were not changed. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) were early warnings of how anti–intellectual, despotic regimes might threaten individual liberties. Later dystopias dealt with specific issues such as racism, environmentalism, and ageism. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) was one of many dealing with the problems of gender in society and government.

History seemed to run parallel to this change of literary tone. Optimistic experiments in communal living, especially during the 1960s in the United States, appeared to be overshadowed by the negative examples of other communities gone awry; leaders such as Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and others led their followers to acts of violence and self–destruction. Writers continued to use warnings as the main method of critiquing current practices. The advent of films from

Metropolis (1926), The Man From Planet X (1951), and Planet of the Apes (1968) to Mad Max (1979),

Blade Runner (1982), and Dark City (1998) further marked the century as the age of the dystopia.

Although the form of utopian thought has changed over time from religious imagery and political blueprint to fictional description and visual drama, one thing is clear: the impulse to describe what might be possible, and in the process to criticize what exists, is a long–lived urge that dates from antiquity to the present day. Theorists over time have expressed their desire for change in many ways. The ideal worlds they have desired have looked different across the years. One thing remains the same: dreamers of different nations and eras all have seen a glimpse of something better and tried in their own ways to bring their societies closer to the world of their dreams.

THEORY IN DEPTH

From the early days of the Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers to the present era of novelists and movie makers, utopianism has never been a theory per se as much as a state of mind, a way of initiating a conversation about the manner in which people can live together best. The utopian thinkers themselves have disagreed widely on the political nature of the good life and espoused a number of different and even contradictory systems that might meet the need of given communities. Utopians fall into their category not so much because of what they seek specifically, but because of how they seek it. Rather than work for incremental reforms within systems, changing existing governments from the inside, utopian thinkers look outside of current models to what could take their places. Rather than reform what exists, utopians dream of replacing it with something new and different. The goals they have often put utopian theorists outside of the mainstream dialogue of political theory. Despite the isolated position of its adherents, utopianism has endured in one form or another for thousands of years.

Although the forms of utopianism are almost as numerous and unique as the individuals who have dreamed of utopias, several key strains of utopian thought appear over and over again; these ideal states involve religion, property, relationships, and past injuries. Any utopia might address several aspects of life—economic, social, personal—but each must have a central cause for its creation. The oldest form of utopia, which dates to the era of the Hebrew prophets in the eighth century B.C. and survives to this day, is the religious utopia.

Religious Utopias

By suggesting the right way to live, utopian thinkers automatically criticize the way of life in their time. If the contemporary systems worked perfectly, after all, then there would be no need to replace them with something else. The religious utopians believe that the practice of or return to a true faith is the heart of the ideal state. Theocracies, or governments led by spiritual leaders, often follow from this type of reasoning. The states of religious utopias often perform the same functions attributed to the church: leading worship of the God/gods, coordinating the rituals/ceremonies of the faith, instructing the people in the values of the faith, and policing the populace to enforce practice of the faith.

The Jewish prophets such as Isaiah believed the true faith existed, but people had fallen away from its

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practice. Their utopias consisted of a return to the traditional practices of Judaism and then the reward from God for their renewed obedience. They held systems and their followers accountable for the fact they had once known the true faith but had abandoned it. Utopia, then, was a return to a previously held practice, though it would be made better, perfected even, the second time around.

In contrast to this point of view, other religious utopian thinkers believed the true faith, or at least some key ingredient in it, was new. This recent revelation called for a different way of living and a new community to support it. These utopian leaders did not seek a return to old ways; they wanted a system that was entirely original. The Shakers, for example, began with a Quaker revival in England in 1747. Led first by James and Jane Wardley, and later by Ann Lee, who believed she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ as a mother figure, the Shakers left England for Watervliet, New York, where they founded the first Shaker colony. Others followed. Though Christian in background, the Shaker utopia looked different than any other Christian community at the time: pacifism, communism, and celibacy, as well as confession to the dual—male and female—nature of God and the equality of the sexes typified these isolated colonies. While the Jewish prophets urged people to remember past teaching and build a perfect world upon it, Shakers urged people to accept a new revelation and build a perfect world on its new tenets. These two contrary impulses—returning to the old wisdom of the past and accepting the new wisdom of the present—formed the two sides to religious utopian thought.

Utopians and Property

A second historical strain of utopianism focuses on the question of property. The inequality of economic systems, the stratification of wealth, and the division of the rich and poor classes serve as repeating motifs in utopian literature. Consequently, many blueprints for a true utopia revolve around the question of property ownership. Many of the utopian works from More’s Utopia (1516) to Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) emphasize the fact that, although every citizen of the ideal state has everything he or she needs, none of the people are overly wealthy. This often is achieved by a kind of communalism in which major property such as agricultural fields or commercial factories are held in common by all citizens and usually managed by the government; therefore, socialist and communist utopias make up many of those preoccupied by the question of property.

Most of the utopians who have written or spoken about property have tended to treat the issue as a procedural matter rather than a natural one. In other words, they have suggested that, with the right structure for government, greed and need would be elimi- nated—the fault lies with the contemporary system, not the people in it. By taking this position, the theorists have not had to be concerned about the human nature of those who govern and distribute property; the assumption is that they will resist temptation and act fairly instead of using their positions for their own advantages. This forms the heart—or, according to critics, the vulnerability—of the property approach to utopianism.

Individual Relationships

Other utopian thinkers have focused less on issues of faith and property than those of individual relationships. For these people, government begins not in the public arena, but in the home; significant reform therefore begins not between the citizen and his or her government, but the individual and his or her family. One of the notions identified with utopianism is that of “free love”—meaning the pursuit of sexual relations outside of the traditional heterosexual conception of marriage. But many utopian thinkers were interested in more than simply experimenting with sexuality. They believed the historical monogamous couple and nuclear family created an impediment for the achievement of the ideal life.

Some utopian thinkers came to this conclusion from different directions. Plato’s concern in his Republic, for example, was one of genetics. He wanted the brightest and best people possible to lead as guardians of his ideal state. By sharing wives and rearing children in common, Plato believed, the most intelligent of the citizens could experiment with mating in different combinations to produce the most gifted offspring possible. Plato’s concern had little to do with feelings and emotions, and much to do with a calculated, if somewhat primitive, attempt at eugenics (improving the hereditary qualities of a race).

On the other hand, other utopian thinkers who have addressed the same kind of questions of sexual and familiar relationships did so for very different reasons. Their concern was not for the efficiency of selective breeding, but with the pleasure of unrestrained experimentation with intimacy. Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes believed the traditional marriage and family would dissolve in favor of a complex family relationship based on caring for the group, the whole—multiple and/or revolving partnerships, as well as different forms of communal parenting, they

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believed, would take the place of the old ways of life. These lifestyles might be efficient, but, more to the point, they would also be exciting and pleasurable. In such utopias, happiness remained the chief objective of the utopian exercise. The counterculture revolution of the 1960s built on this foundation and added experimentation with drugs to the mix.

Still other utopian thinkers focused on issues beyond faith, property, and relationships. These theorists are concerned with historical patterns of injustice and/or wrongdoing and seek to undo specific errors of past systems by creating new ones. Pacifist responses to war, environmentalist responses to pollution, and feminist responses to discrimination offer examples of this kind of approach to building the ideal society. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the response to the rise of totalitarian states such as that of the former Soviet Union in the twentieth century; dystopias such as Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Orwell’s 1984 (1949) warned of what would happen in the future if changes were not made.

Advocates of civil rights and individual liberties contemplated how governments could limit themselves to preserve as much freedom as possible for their citizens. One example of a response to fears of “Big Brother” and its control over the path of individuals’ lives is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).

Utopian Literature

Utopianism as a political theory has had many manifestations—prophecy, revolution, reform—but two main legacies: utopias in literature and experimental communities. The literature of utopianism ranges from works of theory to fiction. The most sophisticated have drawn from theory and fiction to create lasting impressions of ideal worlds.

Plato Plato’s Republic, written in approximately 360 B.C., is considered the foundational work of utopianism. Authors as diverse as Thomas More in the sixteenth century and Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) in the twentieth century drew upon Republic when writing their own contributions to utopian thought. Plato believed that everything on earth was but a shadow of the ideal form of that object or idea; in his Republic, he tried to imagine and describe in detail the ideal form of the state. Republic featured Plato’s late mentor, Socrates, discussing this perfect community with a number of characters and extolling the virtue of reason that guided it. Plato’s paradise consisted of three classes, the lead of which was the guardian class. His utopia therefore was not a democracy, but an aristoc-

Engraving of Sir Thomas More. (The Library of Congress)

racy, led by those dedicated to reason, wisdom, and virtue:

But the simple and temperate desires governed by reason, good sense, and true opinion are to be found only in the few, those who are the best born and the best educated. . . . Both the few and the many have their place in the city. But the meaner desires of the many will be held in check by the virtue and wisdom of the ruling few. It follows that if any city may claim to be master of its pleasures and desires—to be master of itself—it will be ours. For all these reasons, we may properly call our city temperate.

To create this leading class, Plato described a primitive version of selective breeding, including wife–sharing among the guardians, to produce the best human specimens possible. These children also benefit from the most advanced and carefully regulated education available, with everything from books to music carefully censored in order to feed the minds of the future leaders with the best material. In many ways, Plato built a political system in Republic that would avoid the suspicious anti–intellectualism of the Greek process that, years before, had sentenced Socrates to death for corrupting youth and spreading heresy with his philosophical teachings.

More expands on the Republic Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, built on the foundation of Plato’s Republic. It copied many of the classic’s

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BIOGRAPHY:

Sir Thomas More

Thomas More coined the term “utopia” in his 1516 work of the same name. By the time of its publication, More already had built a reputation as a scholar and lawyer in England. His work brought him into contact with a number of luminaries such as Erasmus who formed a Christian humanist movement in the West. These thinkers valued rationality and religion, and sought ways to better themselves and humankind through philosophical inquiry. More joined these humanists, writing and translating a number of histories, prayers, poems, and devotional works.

His most famous publication, Utopia, described an ideal society based on reason. He located this society on an island in the so–called New World of North America. The book explored not only the community’s system of government, but also the details of citizens’ daily lives, from their poetry to their laws of divorce. More, himself a character in the book, acted as a lawyer would, at times cross–examining the traveler who encountered Utopia and his views on what he had found. Some historians have seen More’s focus on orderly justice, peace, and equality in Utopia

as an influence on the later development of Anabaptism, Mormonism, and even communism.

More’s work brought him to the attention of King Henry VIII of England, who took More into his service. In 1521, More was knighted; in 1529, he became Lord Chancellor. A combination of poor health and discomfort with Henry’s failing relationship with the Catholic Church led More to resign in 1532. When Henry required his subjects to submit to his Act of Supremacy, which made Henry the head of the English Church instead of the Pope, the retired More could not go against his conscience and subscribe to the policy. Henry had him imprisoned on a charge of treason in 1534 and, a year later, executed. For his commitment to conscience and the Church, More was beatified in 1886 and canonized in 1935. His life remains a source of contemporary interest, as the multiple stage and screen versions of Robert Bolt’s dramatic biography of More, A Man For All Seasons, prove. The 1998 film Ever After: A Cinderella Story brought More’s work more clearly to mainstream attention by showing and quoting a battered copy of Utopia repeatedly as a blueprint for making the ideal world a reality.

ideas—for example, children were common property of the community in both—with a distinctly Christian twist absent from Plato’s work. The success of More’s venture spawned a wave of utopian works over the next century and inspired various religious and political movements from Mormonism to communism. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the work, however, was its very name, a new addition to the English language.

More’s style also inspired future utopian authors in terms of tone. Wry, witty, and satirical, More wrote not as if exploring a theory in the abstract, but rather as if Utopia existed. This made his work interesting to a wide readership. He also maintained his sense of fun:

Lines on the Island of Utopia by the Poet Laureate, Mr. Windbag nonsenso’s sister’s son: Noplacia was once my name That is, a place where no one goes; Plato’s Republic I now claim To match, or beat at its own game; For that was just a myth in prose, But what he wrote of, I became, Of men, wealth, laws a solid frame, A place where every wise man goes: Goplacia is now my name.

Just as Plato had crafted his Republic in reaction to the contemporary system of Greece, More was moved to write about economics and justice after viewing the disparity of wealth and corruption of legal procedure in Tudor England. The English government that he subtly criticized in Utopia eventually took More’s life when he would not submit to a law he believed was immoral and unjust—an ironic parallel to the death of Socrates that so haunted Plato.

Françoise Rabelais Many of the utopias that followed More’s work suggested that so–called civilization corrupted many of the instincts humans needed to live with one another in peace and harmony. The more complicated and authoritarian governments became, some theorists argued, the less successful they were. To these thinkers, the state of nature, humans’ original condition, possessed certain natural laws— individuals should not kill each other, for example— that made a more innocent time also a more successful one politically. Françoise Rabelais, in his “Abbey

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