“A Map of the World that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at⁠ ⁠…”...

It is a sunny day and I am sitting on the top of a mountain. Until this morning, it had been the mountain of a fairy story that was twenty centuries old. Now, it is a mighty hill and I can feel its wa...

The first outline of this book dates back ten years; and since then I have woven it and rewoven it in my mind. The actual work of composition was started by a suggestion from Mr. Van Wyck Brooks; and ...

Utopia has long been another name for the unreal and the impossible. We have set utopia over against the world. As a matter of fact, it is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities a...

Utopia has long been another name for the unreal and the impossible. We have set utopia over against the world. As a matter of fact, it is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities a...

Man walks with his feet on the ground and his head in the air; and the history of what has happened on earth⁠—the history of cities and armies and of all the things that have had body and form⁠—is onl...

This world of ideas serves many purposes. Two of them bear heavily upon our investigation of utopia. On one hand the pseudo-environment or idolum is a substitute for the external world; it is a sort o...

Why, however, should we find it necessary to talk about utopia and the world of ideas at all? Why should we not rest secure in the bosom of the material environment, without flying off into a region a...

Finally, be convinced about the reality of utopia. All that has happened in what we call human history⁠—unless it has left a building or a book or some other record of itself⁠—is just as remote and in...

Before the great empires of Rome and Macedonia began to spread their camps through the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world, there was a time when the vision of an ideal city seems to have be...

Before the great empires of Rome and Macedonia began to spread their camps through the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world, there was a time when the vision of an ideal city seems to have be...

Plato’s Republic dates roughly from the time of that long and disastrous war which Athens fought with Sparta. In the course of such a war, amid the bombast that patriotic citizens give way to, the peo...

In describing his ideal community Plato, like a trained workman, begins with his physical foundations. So far from putting his utopia in a mythical island of Avilion, where falls not hail nor rain nor...

In the economic foundations of the Republic, we look in vain for a recognition of the labor problem. Now the labor problem is a fundamental difficulty in our modern life; and it seems on the surface t...

How big is Plato’s community, how are the people divided, what are their relations? Now that we have discussed the lay out of the land, and have inquired into the physical basis of this utopia, we are...

It follows almost inevitably from what we have said of Plato’s environment, that his ideal community was not to be unlimited in population. Quite the contrary. Plato said that “the city may increase t...

To Plato, a good community was like a healthy body; a harmonious exercise of every function was the condition of its strength and vitality. Necessarily then a good community could not be simply a coll...

Plato arrives at his apportionment of functions by a method which is old-fashioned, and which anybody versed in modern psychology would regard as a “rationalization.” Plato is trying to give a firm ba...

But to breed Guardians is only one-half the problem. The other half comes under the heads of education and discipline; and when Plato discusses these things, he is not speaking, as a modern college pr...

What is the business of the Guardian? How does Plato’s ideal statesman differ from Julius Caesar or Mr. Theodore Roosevelt? The business of the Guardian is to manufacture liberty. The petty laws, regu...

What do we miss when we look around this utopia of Plato’s? Contacts with the outside world? We may take them for granted. Downy beds, Corinthian girls, luxurious furniture? We can well spare them. Th...

As we leave this little city of Plato’s, nestling in the hills, and as the thin, didactic voice of Plato, who has been perpetually at our elbows, dies away from our ears⁠—what impression do we finally...

There is a span of nearly two thousand years between Plato and Sir Thomas More. During that time, in the Western World at any rate, utopia seems to disappear beyond the horizon. Plutarch’s Life of Lyc...

There is a span of nearly two thousand years between Plato and Sir Thomas More. During that time, in the Western World at any rate, utopia seems to disappear beyond the horizon. Plutarch’s Life of Lyc...

In the introduction to More’s Utopia one gets a vivid impression of the forces that were stirring men’s minds out of the sluggish routine into which they had settled. The man who is supposed to descri...

In setting out for Utopia Sir Thomas More left behind a scene which in its political violence and economic maladjustment looks queerly like our own. Indeed, there are a good many passages which need o...

Geographically viewed, the island of Utopia exists only in More’s imagination. All that we can say of it is that it is two hundred miles broad, shaped something like a crescent, with an entrance into ...

The economic base of this commonwealth is agriculture, and no one is ignorant of the art. Here and there over the countryside are great farmhouses, equipped for carrying on agricultural operations. Wh...

So much for the daily industrial life of the Utopians. How are the goods distributed? Between the city and the country there is a monthly exchange of goods. This occasion is made a festival, and the c...

The town life of the Utopians, as I have explained, rests upon rural foundations; there is such a mixture of town and country as Peter Kropotkin sought to realize in his sketch of Fields, Factories, a...

Now that we have laid the foundations of the material life, we must observe the limitations that are laid upon the daily activities of the Utopians. This brings us to the government. The basis of the ...

There is not the space to follow the life of the Utopians in all its details. It is time to discuss the world of ideas by which these Utopians chart their daily activities. This exposition of the basi...

Such are the goals for which the Utopians direct their social order. These values are, I need scarcely point out, rooted in the nature of man, and not in any set of external institutions. The aim of e...

A hundred years pass, and the man who next conducts us into Utopia is a Humanist scholar. After the manner of his time, he answers to the latinized name, Johann Valentin Andreae. He is a traveller, a ...

A hundred years pass, and the man who next conducts us into Utopia is a Humanist scholar. After the manner of his time, he answers to the latinized name, Johann Valentin Andreae. He is a traveller, a ...

This island is a whole world in miniature. As in the Republic, the unit once more is the valley section, for the “island is rich in grain and pasture fields, watered with rivers and brooks, adorned wi...

When we look back upon the Republic, with its external organization so plainly modeled upon military Sparta, we see the camp and the soldier giving the pattern to the life of the whole community. In U...

What is the character of this artisan democracy? The answer to this is summed up in one of those sayings that Andreae, in the midst of his energetic exposition, drops by the way. “To he wise and to wo...

The place of commerce in this scheme of life is simple. It does not exist for the sake of individual gain. Hence no one engages in commerce on his own hook, for such matters are put in the hands of “t...

The constitution of the family in Christianopolis follows pretty definitely upon the lines dictated by urban occupations; for Andreae is a city man, and since he does not despise the advantages city l...

Suppose that our friends have children. During the early years of their life they are in the care of their mother. When they have completed their sixth year, the children are given over to the care of...

We have discussed folk, work, and place in Christianopolis; and we have dealt in an admittedly sketchy fashion with culture and art. We must now turn attention to the polity; and here we must note tha...

A Genoese sea-captain is the guest of a Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller. This sea-captain tells him of a great country under the equator, dominated by the City of the Sun. The outward appearan...

A Genoese sea-captain is the guest of a Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller. This sea-captain tells him of a great country under the equator, dominated by the City of the Sun. The outward appearan...

Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is not a utopia in the sense that I have explained our principle of selection in the preface to the bibliography. It is only a fragment, and not very good as fragments go;...

There is a gap in the Utopian tradition between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth. Utopia, the place that must be built, faded into no-man’s land, the spot to which one might escape; and the ...

There is a gap in the Utopian tradition between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth. Utopia, the place that must be built, faded into no-man’s land, the spot to which one might escape; and the ...

The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and those of the later men of the Renaissance, arose, as I have pointed out, from the contrast between the possibilities that lay open beyond the sea and the dismal cond...

Among the Associationists, the most influential utopian is Charles François Marie Fourier. He was a prolific and incoherent writer, and his Utopia, if the truth be told, exists as disjecta membra rath...

What strikes us when we put together the fragments of Fourier’s utopia⁠—as one might put together a jigsaw puzzle⁠—is the fact that he faces the variety and inequality of human nature. Instead of erec...

The name of Robert Owen is usually associated with utopianism; but his work belongs more to the “real” world than to the idola of utopia; and I pass over him with the briefest mention, for his project...

One of the neglected utopias of the mid-nineteenth century is that of James Buckingham. James Buckingham was one of those erratic men of affairs which the fertile soil of British individualism produce...

Before the Industrial Revolution upset the balance of social power, there were little villages in England where, on a limited scale and to no very grand purpose, a quiet and placid and fairly jolly ex...

Before the Industrial Revolution upset the balance of social power, there were little villages in England where, on a limited scale and to no very grand purpose, a quiet and placid and fairly jolly ex...

The early part of the nineteenth century is remarkable for the fact that men of common stock, usually self-educated, began to apply their wits to improving the conditions of the class to which they be...

The next utopia, Freeland, marks a transition between the utopia in which the land alone is held by the community and that in which land and capital and all the machinery of production belongs to a na...

A visit to Freeland teaches us little about the arts of social life or the constitution of a good society. What we can learn is one of the methods by which⁠—on hypothesis anyway⁠—the industrial mechan...

What sort of life arises out of this kind of industrial association, these provisions for the common use of machinery and land? It is all rather dry and colorless, a sort of picture postcard view of t...

Étienne Cabet opened his eyes upon the year that preceded the meeting of the National Assembly in 1788, and closed them upon the Empire of Napoleon III. It would be foolish to give an account of Cabet...

Étienne Cabet opened his eyes upon the year that preceded the meeting of the National Assembly in 1788, and closed them upon the Empire of Napoleon III. It would be foolish to give an account of Cabet...

With the romantic element in the Journey to Icaria⁠—the English lord and the Icarian family he visits, and the various friendships and love affairs that are outlined in its pages⁠—I purpose to have no...

In the beginning was Icar, the dictator who established the government of Icaria, and out of Icar there sprang a number of bureaus, departments, and committees. Let us follow a typical Icarian through...

Looking backward into the future: that was the paradox by which a young New England romancer, Edward Bellamy, concerned like Thoreau and Emerson and the rest of the great Concord school with the well-...

If Plato cavalierly disposes of the labor problem of the Republic by permitting things to remain pretty much as they were, Bellamy makes the solution of labor organization and the distribution of weal...

The great part of Looking Backward is a discussion of this perfected form of industrial organization; the manner in which it is worked; and the effects of complete economic equality in doing away with...

It would be a pretty sad thing if the Utopias of the nineteenth century were all of a piece with those of Buckingham and Bellamy. In general we may say that all the utopias of reconstruction had a dea...

It would be a pretty sad thing if the Utopias of the nineteenth century were all of a piece with those of Buckingham and Bellamy. In general we may say that all the utopias of reconstruction had a dea...

As the clouded vision of the traveller to the Crystal Age clears, he finds himself received in a great Country House, which is inhabited by a large group of men and women who till the land and perform...

There are times when one may look upon the whole adventure of civilized life as a sort of Odyssey of domestication; and in this mood the Crystal Age marks a terminus upon that particular aspect of the...

There are regions in the world⁠—I am thinking perhaps of the table land of South Africa and the Mississippi Valley⁠—where if one dreamed about utopia the apparatus to support it would be a gigantic ne...

Sanity and health and goodwill and tolerance⁠—as one sculls along the Thames, above Richmond, on a Sunday morning, between boatloads of gay picnickers and sauntering people, it is not impossible to im...

The utopia that remains for consideration is the last important one in point of time; and it is, curiously enough, the quintessential utopia, for it is written with a free and critical gesture, and wi...

The glimpses that one gets of this utopia are full of color and light and movement; there are finely contained cities, surrounded by wide suburban territories, cities that are not built of paper and a...

Now that we have ransacked the literature of ideal commonwealths for examples of the utopian vision and the utopian method, there remains another class of utopias which has still to be reckoned with, ...

Now that we have ransacked the literature of ideal commonwealths for examples of the utopian vision and the utopian method, there remains another class of utopias which has still to be reckoned with, ...

To understand the utopia of the Country House we must jump back a few centuries in history. Anyone who has ranged through the European castles that were built before the fourteenth century will realiz...

We do not know the Country House until we realize, to begin with, what its physical characteristics are like. There are a great many descriptions which the reader may consult if he does not happen to ...

When we turn our attention from Rabelais’ conceit of an anti-monastic order, we discover that he has given us an excellent picture of the Country House, and of what I shall take the liberty of calling...

Perhaps the shortest way to suggest the character of Country House institutions is to say that they are the precise opposite of everything that Plato looked upon as desirable in a good community. The ...

Let us admit what is valid in the utopia of the Country House. Enjoyment is a necessary element in achievement, and by its regard for the decent graces of life, for such things as an ease in manners a...

The industrial bearing of the Renaissance ideal is of capital importance. During the Middle Age the emphasis in industry was upon the production of tangible goods: the craft guilds set high standards ...

The chief difference between the individual utopias of the nineteenth century and the “collective representation” of Coketown is that these individual utopias were concerned to repair certain points w...

There is one phenomenon still to be accounted for in the economy of Coketown; one monumental instrument without which the wheels of Coketown would become clogged and the very breath of Coketown be ext...

By what means can the Country House keep Coketown working for it? The idolum of the Country House, which was built up during the Renaissance, and the idolum of Coketown, which was formed in the early ...

The earth that the geographer surveys is divided into five great land masses. These land masses in turn can be broken up into a number of natural regions, each of which has within its rough and approx...

The chief instrument of the National State is Megalopolis, its biggest city, the place where the idolum of the National Utopia was first created, and where it is perpetually willed into existence. In ...

It should be plain that in describing the National Utopia and Megalopolis I have been trying to outline what Plato would call the pure form. It is equally clear, I trust, that the pure form is an idol...

The picture of the National Utopia that I have drawn is perhaps a little too black to stand out clearly; and I must now add a few high lights for definition. As in Coketown, there was a point up to wh...

If Coketown and the Country House and the National Utopia had remained on paper, they would doubtless be entertaining and edifying contributions to our literature. Unfortunately, these social myths ha...

There have been many periods when men did not think it possible to make life in the community reach much higher levels than it had attained, without working a change upon human nature. The working of ...

There have been many periods when men did not think it possible to make life in the community reach much higher levels than it had attained, without working a change upon human nature. The working of ...

For all the activities that men engage in we have separate words. This is a great misfortune; for in using these words we tend to believe that each action takes place in a separate compartment. Instea...

There was still another weakness that characterized all the partisan utopias of the nineteenth century. That weakness was their externalism. If the medieval thinkers were convinced that, on the whole,...

Let me now anticipate the answer which this criticism will probably meet. To some people it will seem that the current movements for reform are inevitably secular; that they have no business to concer...

There is a final criticism of the partial utopias: our one-sided reforms have had this fatal defect⁠—they are one-sided. This partisanship was expressed by their relation to the facts upon which their...

What a vision these partisan utopias present! They are like the scattered bones that the prophet saw in the terrible valley, and one doubts whether even the breath of the Lord could knit them together...

The sort of thinking that has created our utopias has placed desire above reality; and so their chief fulfillment has been in the realm of fantasy. This is true of the classic utopias that we have sur...

The sort of thinking that has created our utopias has placed desire above reality; and so their chief fulfillment has been in the realm of fantasy. This is true of the classic utopias that we have sur...

There was a time when the world of knowledge and the world of dreams were not separated; when the artist and the scientist, for all practical purposes, saw the “outside world” through the same kind of...

There is a point up to which each science may well be left to cultivate its field for its own sake, without any regard for the fruits. Mr. Thorstein Veblen, in The Place of Science in Civilization, ha...

If the sciences are to be cultivated anew with respect for a definite hierarchy of human values, it seems to me that the sciences must be focused again upon particular local communities, and the probl...

The needed reorientation of science is important; but by itself it is not enough. Knowledge is a tool rather than a motor; and if we know the world without being able to react upon it, we are guilty o...

Up to about the middle of the seventeenth century, before modern physical science had rigorously defined its field, the breach between literature and science, which Aristotle had made, was not altoget...

We must now consider the development of the arts in the modern community. At the height of the Middle Age, as in fifth century Athens, the arts formed together a living unity. A citizen did not go int...

No matter how the modern artist may use or fritter away his abilities, it is plain that he has an enormous reservoir of power at his disposal. What, for instance, has made America so wholly devoted to...

For examples of what the artist might be, and what his proper relation to the community might be when he was mature enough to recognize it and discipline himself to it, let us look at Mr. William Butl...

It comes to this then: our plans for a new social order have been as dull as mud because, in the first place, they have been abstract and cockney, and have not taken into account the immense diversity...

What, then, is the first step out of the present disorder? The first step, it seems to mc, is to ignore all the fake utopias and social myths that have proved either so sterile or so disastrous during...

In discussing the foundations of Eutopia I am conscious of a certain abstractness in my method of argument; conscious that I have not been a good utopian in dealing with these proud idols that we may ...

For the benefit of the reader who wishes to travel further along the trails opened up in this survey of utopias, I am giving a list of the principal books on the subject. This list includes all the im...

Plato (427 BC−347 BC). The Republic. Translated with notes and essays by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: 1894. See also Plato’s “Critias” and “Statesman” in the same edition. The Laws, which is a more detail...