region is not a _carte blanche_ which any one may fill in at his will
and caprice; certain lines have already been fixed; certain spaces have
already been filled. There is a consensus among all utopian writers,
to begin with, that the land and natural resources belong undividedly
to the community; and even when it is worked by separate people or
associations, as in Utopia and Freeland the increment of the land--the
economic rent--belongs to the community as a whole. There is also
a pretty common notion among the Utopians that, as land is a common
possession, so is work a common function; and no one is let off from
some sort of labor of body or mind because of any inherited privileges
or dignities that he can point to. Finally, there is the almost equally
common notion, among the utopians, that the perpetuation of the species
leaves plenty of room for improvement, and that, as far as human
knowledge and foresight are worth anything, it should be applied to
propagation; so that the most reckless and ill-bred shall not burden
the community with the support of their offspring while those of finer
capacity are neglected or overwhelmed in numbers.
Besides these general conditions for the good life which the utopians
unite to emphasize, there are certain other points in the utopian
tradition of which one writer or another has given the classic
statement.
With Plato we see the enormous importance of birth and education; we
recognize the part good breeding, in every sense of the word, must
play in the good community. Sir Thomas More makes us aware of the fact
that a community becomes a community to the extent that it has shared
possessions, and he suggests that the local group might develop such a
common life as the old colleges of Oxford have enjoyed. When we turn
to Christianopolis, we are reminded that the daily life and work of
the community must be infused with the spirit of science, and that an
acute practical intelligence such as we find today among the engineers
need not be divorced from the practice of the humanities. Even the
nineteenth century utopias have a contribution to make. They remind
us by their overemphasis that all the proud and mighty idealisms in
the world are so many shadows unless they are supported by the whole
economic fabric--so that “eutopia” is not merely a matter of spiritual
conversion, as the ancient religions taught, but of economic and
geotechnic reconstruction. Finally, from James Buckingham and Ebenezer
Howard we can learn the importance of converting the idolum of eutopia
into plans and layouts and detailed projections, such as a townplanner
might utilize; and we may suspect that a eutopia which cannot be
converted into such specific plans will continue, as the saying is, to
remain up in the air.
Taken together, there is a powerful impulse towards creating a good
environment for the good life in the classic utopias we have examined:
from one or another utopia we may draw elements which will enrich
every part of the community’s life. By following the utopian tradition
we shall not merely escape from the fake utopias that have dominated
us: we shall return to reality. More than that, we shall return upon
reality and perhaps--who can tell?--we shall re-create it!
12
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 idola that we may project in
every region. Let us come down to earth now and realize what all this
amounts to when we turn away from the library and mingle again on the
highways that lead past our door.
First of all, I conceive that we shall not attempt to envisage a single
utopia for a single unit called humanity; that is the sort of thin and
tepid abstraction which the discipline of the Regional Survey will
tend to kill off even in people who are now inured by education to
dealing only in verbal things. All the human beings on the planet are
a unity only for the sake of talking about them; and as far as that
goes, there is very little profitable conversation that can apply to a
Greenlander, a Parisian, and a Chinaman, except the mere observation
that they are all on the same little boat of a planet and would
probably be much happier if they minded their own business and were not
too insistent about inflicting their institutions and their idola upon
their neighbors.
We shall have to dismiss, as equally futile, the notion of a single
stratification of mankind, such as the working class, serving as
the foundation for our Eutopia: the notion that the working class
consists simply of urban workers is a cockney imbecility, and as soon
as one rectifies it and includes the agricultural population, we have
“humanity” pretty much all over again. Finally, if we are to give
eutopia a local habitation it will not be founded upon the National
State, for the National State is a myth which sane people will no more
sacrifice their lives to than they would hand their children into the
furnace of some tribal Moloch; and a good idolum cannot be founded on
the basis of a bad one.
As far as extent or character of territory goes, we will remember that
the planet is not as smooth as a billiard ball, and that the limits
of any genuine community rest within fairly ascertainable geographic
regions in which a certain complex of soil, climate, industry,
institutional life and historic heritage has prevailed. We shall not
attempt to legislate for all these communities at one stroke; for we
shall respect William Blake’s dictum that one law for the lion and
the ox is tyranny. There are some 15,000,000 local communities in the
world, the Postal Directory tells us; and our eutopia will necessarily
take root in one of these real communities, and include within its
co-operations as many other communities, as have similar interests
and identities. It may be that our eutopia will embrace a population
as great as that in the Metropolis of London or New York; but it is
needless to say that the land which lies beyond the limits of the
metropolis will no longer be regarded as a sort of subterranean factory
for the production of agricultural goods. In sum, as Patrick Geddes has
finely said, in the Kingdom of Eutopia--the world Eutopia--there will
be many mansions.
The inhabitants of our eutopias will have a familiarity with their
local environment and its resources, and a sense of historic
continuity, which those who dwell within the paper world of Megalopolis
and who touch their environment mainly through the newspaper and the
printed book, have completely lost. The people of Newcastle will no
longer go to London for coals, as the people in the provinces have
in a sense been doing this last century and more: there will be a
more direct utilization of local resources than would have seemed
profitable or seemly to the metropolitan world which now has command
of the market. In these varied eutopias, it is safe to say, there
will be a new realization of the fact that a cultivated life is
essentially a settled life: their citizens will have discovered that
the great privilege of travelling from Brooklyn to Bermondsey, and
from Bermondsey to Bombay is scarcely worth the trouble when the
institutions of Brooklyn, Bermondsey, and Bombay, and every other
purely industrial center, are identical--sanitary drinking devices and
canned goods and moving pictures being the same wherever mechanical
duplication of goods for a world market has taken the place of direct
adaptation to local needs.
It should not surprise us therefore if the foundations of eutopia
were established in ruined countries; that is, in countries where
metropolitan civilization has collapsed and where all its paper
prestige is no longer accepted at its paper value. There was the
beginning of a genuine eutopian movement in Denmark after the war
with Germany in the ’sixties: under the leadership of Bishop Gruntwig
came a revival of folk traditions in literature and a renascence of
education which has renewed the life of the Danish countryside and made
an intelligent farmer and an educated man out of the boor. It would
not be altogether without precedent if such a eutopian renascence took
place in Germany, in Austria, in Russia; and perhaps on another scale
in India and China and Palestine; for all these regions are now face to
face with realities which the “prosperous” paperism of our metropolitan
civilization has largely neglected.
If the inhabitants of our Eutopias will conduct their daily affairs
in a possibly more limited environment than that of the great
metropolitan centers, their mental environment will not be localized or
nationalized. For the first time perhaps in the history of the planet
our advance in science and invention has made it possible for every
age and every community to contribute to the spiritual heritage of the
local group; and the citizen of eutopia will not stultify himself by
being, let us say, a hundred per cent Frenchman when Greece, China,
England, Scandinavia and Russia can give sustenance to his spiritual
life. Our eutopians will necessarily draw from this wider environment
whatever can be assimilated by the local community; and they will thus
add any elements that may be lacking in the natural situation.
The chief business of eutopians was summed up by Voltaire in the final
injunction of Candide: Let us cultivate our garden. The aim of the real
eutopian is the culture of his environment, most distinctly not the
culture, and above all not the exploitation, of some other person’s
environment. Hence the size of our Eutopia may be big or little;
it may begin in a single village; it may embrace a whole region. A
little leaven will leaven the whole loaf; and if a genuine pattern
for the eutopian life plants itself in any particular locality it may
ramify over a whole continent as easily as Coketown duplicated itself
throughout the Western World. The notion that no effective change can
be brought about in society until millions of people have deliberated
upon it and willed it is one of the rationalizations which are dear to
the lazy and the ineffectual. Since the first step towards eutopia is
the reconstruction of our idola, the foundations for eutopia can be
laid, wherever we are, without further ado.
Our most important task at the present moment is to build castles
in the air. We need not fear, as Thoreau reminds us, that the work
will be lost. If our eutopias spring out of the realities of our
environment, it will be easy enough to place foundations under them.
Without a common design, without a grand design, all our little
bricks of reconstruction might just as well remain in the brickyard;
for a disharmony between men’s minds betokens, in the end, the speedy
dilapidation of whatever they may build. Our final word is a counsel
of perfection. When that which is perfect has come, that which is
imperfect will pass away.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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 important
utopias that are accessible in English, as well as a few that are not;
but it is not exhaustive, for the region of Utopia has its swamps and
arid places as well as its fertile and cultivated land; and no one but
a scholarly explorer need attempt to enter the more forbidding parts of
the country.
Needless to say, in dealing with our historic utopias I had a rough
criterion of selection. I set out to treat such plans for the
improvement of the human community as had been embodied in complete
pictures of an ideal commonwealth: this excluded important essays in
politics like Hobbes’ Leviathan and Harrington’s Oceana; and it ruled
out any treatment of abstract idealisms which, however important, did
not exemplify the essential utopian method. Next, I resolved to deal at
length only with those utopias which have exercised some influence on
thought and life, particularly in the Western European world. Third,
I sought to emphasize what was common in the methods and ends of the
classic utopias; making plain their relations within the world of
utopias and their relevance in the present day, rather than attempting
to show in any detail the social milieu in which each utopian wrote.
In dealing with the nineteenth century my criterion became a little
shaky; and I frankly chose the nineteenth century utopias on the basis
of their association with temporal movements like state socialism, the
single tax, and syndicalism, rather than because of their conformity
to standards which served to weed out irrelevant utopias in the earlier
centuries. In devoting a little space to Fourier and Spence and
giving short shrift to Owen I have tried to restore these interesting
and significant figures to the place that they deserve. There will
doubtless be disagreements over my selections and the amount of space
I have allotted to various writers; but at least, where there has been
madness there has also been method.
Certain parts of the argument are not covered by this list of utopias.
The best introductions to utopian literature in general are in German;
see R. Blueher’s excellent pamphlet on Moderne Utopien; Ein Beitrag
zur Geschichte des Sozialismus, Bonn: 1920. While Mr. Van Wyck Brooks
put me independently on the trail of Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme I
must acknowledge, with as much grace as possible, that Herr Blueher
anticipated me in grasping this clue to Renascence culture; and if
any credit is due, he deserves it. The most exhaustive catalogue of
pre-nineteenth century utopias is contained in Kautsky’s Vorläufer des
Modernen Sozialismus. Max Beer’s History of British Socialism has an
excellent discussion of the relation of the Utopians to socialism. See
also Moritz Kaufmann’s Utopias; or Schemes of Social Improvement, from
Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx, London: 1879. In the excellent History
of Utopian Thought, by Dr. J. O. Hertzler (Macmillan: 1923), the
phantasists are sympathetically treated.
The chapter on the Country House might well be prefaced by Mr.
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, a satire which seems
to me unique in scholarship and originality. The importance of our
social myths and our collective representations has been noted by a
whole school of French sociologists who follow Émile Durkheim; and the
dynamic force of ideas has been treated by Alfred Fouillée. On both
these topics there is a whole literature; and it would give a sense of
false simplicity to single out any particular essay. There is a fairly
popular discussion of the place of myths and ideals in the George
Sorel’s Reflexions on Violence, and Benjamin Kidd’s Science of Power
(especially Chapter V.).
As a loose illustration of the general method and outlook embodied
in this book I refer to the Making of the Future Series, edited by
Messrs. Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford and published by Williams
& Norgate, London. There is an able exposition of the regionalist
movement and of the fundamental realities upon which this movement
is based in two books published in that series; namely, Professor
Fleure’s Human Geography in Western Europe and C. B. Fawcett’s The
Provinces of England. Two works by the editors, The Coming Polity and
Our Social Inheritance are likewise suggestive. Professor Geddes is
the outstanding exponent of the Eutopian method both in thought and in
practical activity; and the reader should consult his City Development
(1904) and his Town-Planning towards City Development: a Report to the
Durbar of Indore, 2 vols. Indore, 1918. Both of these books are mines
from which all sorts of precious thoughts can be quarried. Remaindered
copies of the first can be obtained from John Grant, Bookseller,
Edinburgh; while the second is sold by Botsford, High Holborn, London.
Professor Geddes’ work exemplifies concretely a good part of what I
have sought to explain and define in not altogether adequate prose.
UTOPIAS
PLATO (427 B.C.–347 B.C.). 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 detailed attempt to work out the details of a good
polity, is so lacking in Plato’s original inspiration that,
but for Aristotle’s allusion to it, one would promptly take
it for the work of another hand.
MORE, SIR THOMAS (1478–1535). Utopia. Published originally in
Latin in 1516. There are numerous modern editions. See Ideal
Commonwealths, edited by Henry Morley.
ANDREÆ, JOHANN VALENTIN (1586–1654). Christianopolis. Published
in 1619 and translated in 1916 by Felix Emil Held under the
title of Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the 17th Century.
Oxford University Press. Mr. Held’s introduction contains an
account of Andreæ’s life.
BACON, FRANCIS (1561–1626). The New Atlantis. Published in
1627. Bacon contemplated writing a second part which would
deal with the laws of his ideal commonwealth. See Ideal
Commonwealths.
CAMPANELLA, TOMASSO (1568–1639). The City of the Sun. Published
in 1637 as Civitas Solis Poetica: Idea Reipublicæ
Philosophiæ. See Ideal Commonwealths. ALLAIS, DENIS VAIRASSE
D’ (--). L’Histoire des Sevarambes. Written in 1672 and
translated into English as The History of the Sevarites,
written by one Captain Siden, London: 1675. In Kautsky’s
Vorläufer des Modernen Sozialismus this utopia is given
high praise and is ranked as the French parallel of More’s
Utopia; but I feel that this is a sad error in judgment which
perhaps arose out of the bare fact that the first law of
the great dictator Sevarias was to put all private property
in the hands of the state, to be disposed of absolutely by
its authority, and to do away with distinctions of rank
and hereditary dignity. There is little that is fresh or
imaginative in Vairasse’s treatment, however, and there
is nothing like More’s detailed effort to guard against
usurpation of power by the ruling classes. As simple fiction,
the History of the Sevarites is, however, readable. See
also L’Histoire des Galligènes, by Tiphaigne de la Roche;
likewise the excellent satire, Giphantia. The description of
Salentum, under Mentor, in Fénélon’s Telemachus should not be
neglected. The Abbé Morelly’s Basiliade is little more than a
definition of his Code de la Nature.
MERCIER, LOUIS SEBASTIEN (1740–1814). Memoirs of the Year 2500.
Published in French in 1772 and translated into English,
Liverpool: 1802.
SPENCE, THOMAS (1750–1814). Description of Spensonia.
Constitution of Spensonia. London: 1795. Privately printed at
the Courier Press; Leamington Spa: 1917.
FOURIER, CHARLES FRANÇOIS MARIE (1772–1837). Traité de
l’Association domestique agricole. 2 vols. 1822. Le Nouveau
Monde Industriel. 2 vols. 1829. See also Albert Brisbane in
his General Introduction to the Social Sciences (Fourier’s
“Social Destinies”), and Selections from the Works of
Fourier, translated by Julia Franklin, with an introduction
by Charles Gide, London: 1901.
CABET, ÉTIENNE (1788–1856). Voyage en Icarie. Published in 1845
and numerous editions followed during the next five years;
see that of the Bureau du Populaie, Paris: 1848.
BUCKINGHAM, JAMES SILK (1786–1855). National Evils and Practical
Remedies, with a plan for a model town. London: 1848.
BULWER-LYTTON, E. (1803–1873). The Coming Race; or the New
Utopia. London: 185--. A fantastic romance about a people who
live underground, possess detachable wings, and command a
potency known as “vril.” It is perhaps not altogether without
significance that this new hierarchy of industrial angels was
conceived by Lytton in the same decade that saw the building
of the Crystal Palace.
PEMBERTON, ROBERT (--). The Happy Colony. London: 1854. This is
an appeal to the working class, somewhat similar in temper
and method to Buckingham’s appeal to the middle class.
Pemberton had an individual system of psychology which he
desired to apply in education. This utopia has now only a
limited historical significance.
BELLAMY, EDWARD (1850–1898). Looking Backward; Boston: 1888.
Equality; Boston: 1897.
HERTZKA, THEODOR (1845–?). Freeland: A Social Anticipation.
First edition published in German, 1889; English translation
published by the British Freeland Association in 1891. A
Visit to Freeland, or the New Paradise Regained. Translation
published by the above Association, London: 1894. The first
work lays the foundations for the utopia; the second is the
ideal commonwealth in action.
MORRIS, WILLIAM (1834–1896). News from Nowhere. London: 1890.
There have been numerous editions.
HOWARD, EBENEZER (1850–?). Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London:
1902. First published as Tomorrow in 1898. Unique among
utopian books in that its eutopia has been partly realized.
See numerous descriptions of Letchworth, the first Garden
City.
HUDSON, W. H. (--). A Crystal Age. London: 1906.
THIRION, ÉMILE (1825–?). Neustria: Utopie Individualiste. Paris:
1901. This is one of the rare, deliberately individualistic
utopias, founded on work, liberty, and property. It assumes
that a colony of Girondists were able to establish themselves
in South America.
HERZL, THEODOR (1860–1904). Altneuland. Leipzig: 1903.
TARDE, GABRIEL (1843–1904). Underground Man. London: 1905. A deft
and well-conceived fantasy, full of excellent criticism.
Towards the past it is a utopia of reconstruction, towards
the future--but herein lies much of its charm!--it is one of
escape.
WELLS, H. G. (1866-?). A Modern Utopia. New York: 1905.
CRAM, RALPH ADAMS (1863–?). Walled Towns. Boston: 1919. Dr.
Cram does not classify this work as a utopia; but the
honest critic cannot help giving it that label. Dr. Cram
sees no basis for eutopia without the system of values and
the sanctions perpetuated by the Christian Church; since
this leaves the greater part of humanity in Darkness, I
cannot agree with him. Dr. Cram, however, is a fine scholar
and a stimulating critic; and if one could only grant his
assumptions his conclusions would be magnificent.
MORLEY, HENRY. Ideal Commonwealths; Plutarch’s Lycurgus, More’s
Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Campanella’s City of the Sun,
and a Fragment of Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem, with an
introduction by Henry Morley. London: G. Routledge, 1886.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Chapter One did not indicate the beginning of section “5”. Transcriber
added it by referencing an earlier edition of the book.
Text mostly uses “utopia” but sometimes uses “eutopia”. Both retained
here.
Page 104: “the tale end” was printed that way.
Page 224: “perfunctory seal upon” was printed as “perfunctory real
upon”; changed here.
Page 231: “advertized” was printed that way.
Page 294: “A. E.” was the pseudonym of George William Russell.