What Is a Utopia? - Morus

What Is a Utopia?
Lyman Tower Sargent
Lyman Tower Sargent é professor de Ciências Políticas na Universidade
de Missouri-St. Louis e Honorary Research Fellow no Departamento de
História no Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, Universidade
de Londres. É Professor Visitante nas Universidades de Exeter e East
Anglia, na London School of Economics and Political Science, e na
Victoria University of Wellington (Nova Zelândia). Foi Membro
Visitante do Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). Foi o editor
fundador da Utopian Studies (1990 2004), autor de British and American
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Utopian Literature, 15 16-198 5: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography
(1988), Contemporary Political Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis (13th
ed. 2005), New Left Thought: An Introduction (1972), co autor, com
Lucy Sargisson, de Living in Utopia: Intentional Communities in New
Zealand (2004); co editor, com Gregory Claeys, de The Utopia Reader
(1999), editor de Extremism in America: A Reader (1995) e Political
Thought in the United States: A Documentary History (1997), além de
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ser autor ou editor de outros livros e de uma centena de artigos, em sua
maioria sobre aspectos do utopismo. Junto com Gregory Claeys, foi o
fundador e co-editor da Syracuse University Press Series on Utopianism
and Communitarianism, que publicou mais de vinte volumes. De 1997
a 2000 deu supervisão à Bibliothèque Nationale de France e ao New
York Public Library em sua exposição conjunta "Utopie: La quête de la
société idéale en Occident/Utopia: The Quest for the Ideal Society in
the West" exibida em Paris de Abril a Julho de 2000 e em Nova York
de Outubro de 2000 a Janeiro de 2001. É co-editor, com Roland Schaer
e Gregory Claeys dos catálogos publicados para acompanhar estas
exposições. Recebeu o "Distinguished Scholar Award" da Society for
Utopian Studies e do Communal Studies Association.
LYMAN TOWER SARGENT
1 See, in chronological order,
Sargent, "The Three Faces of
Utopianism" (1967), "Utopia:
The Problem of Definition"
(1975), "Introduction"
to British and American
Utopian Literatura 15161975 (1979)," Political
Dimensions of Utopianism
Wm
A
ith
eriScpan
ecicalo Referentar
cei to sin.
(1992), "The Three Faces
of Utopianism Revisited"
(1994), "The Problem of the
'Flawed Utopia . " (2003), and
"Utopia." New Dictionary of
the History of Ideas (2004). My
most recent definitions are as
follows:
Utopianism: social dreaming.
Utopia: a non-existent society
described in considerable
detail and nonnally located in
time and space. In standard
usage utopia is used both
as defined here and as an
equivalent for eutopia (below).
Eutopia or positive utopia: a
non-existent society described
in considerable detail and
normally located in time and
space that the author intended
a contemporaneous reader to
view as considerably better
than the society in which that
reader lived.
Dystopia or negative utopia: a
non-existent society described
in considerable detail and
normafiy located In time and
space that the author intended
a contemporaneous reader to
view as considerably worse
than the society in which that
reader lived. The first use of
this word is usually ascribed
to Negley and Patrick's
to their
anthology, but there were
much earlier uses. Deirdre
Ni Chuanacháin has recently
noted a use in 1747 by Henry
Lewis Younge in bis Utopia or
Apollo's Golden Days. Before
this discovery, the earliest
usage appeared to be in 1782.
See Patricia Kõster, "Dystopia:
An Eighteenth Century
Appearance." Notes & Querias
228 (n. s. 30, no. 1) (February
1983): 65-66 where she says
that the first use was in 1782
by Noel Turner (1739-1826) as
dys-topia [first three letters in
Greek] in "Letter VICE" of bis
"Introduction"
154
One would think that, in the almost five hundred years since
Thomas More coined the word utopia, there would be agreement on
its meaning, but there still remam n some fundamental disagreements,
including both old and relatively new problems. Over the years, I have
written extensively on definitional questions', .and here I shall focus on
what I see as continuing issues in the scholarship that I believe to be
particularly important. There are, I think, a number of reasons for the
continuing issues, and in this essay I want to glance at some of those
reasons and the problems they raise. In doing so, I shall comment on
the shifting boundaries of the definition of utopia and argue that while
some definitions are simply wrong, we should not expect that a single
definition wifl fit all times and places.
More's use of the word he invented gave rise to problems because
it was itself playful. In "Six Lines on the Island of Utopia", he wrote,
"The ancients called me Utopia or Nowhere because of my isolation.
At present, however, I am a rival of Plato's republic, perhaps even a
victor over it. The reason is that what he has delineated in words I alone
have exhibited in man and resources and laws of surpassing excellence.
Deservedly ought I to be called by the name of Eutopia or Happy
Land" (More, Utopia, 21). This play on words provides the earliest
source for problems of meaning.
Second, the word "utopia" became the label for a genre ofliterature,
and authors who wrote within that genre pushed at the boundaries they
found and radically expanded the scope of the genre and thus the word.
For example, in 1872 Samuel Butler published Erewhon, which clearly
belongs in the genre but which also looks very different from More's
Utopia. As a result, the word "erewhonian" was invented to describe this
sub-genre, and other sub-genres like Gulliveriana and Robinsonaden
developed even earlier. Thus, authors doing what they do best, being
creative, have made the original complex term infinitely more complex.
A recent example of a new form is Abaza: A Modern Encyclopedia (2001)
by Louis Nowra, which is an encyclopedia describing a dystopia.
Third, More's word carne to describe not just a literary genre
but also a way of thinking, which I call utopianism, and utopia and
utopianism are often conflated. This is important because it leads to
works that do not look at all like More's Utopia being called utopias
because at some point they involve thinking about different ways of
living. For example, descriptions of ideal cities and what might be called
architectural utopias have long been appropriately considered as part of
utopianism, but often they have not been part of the literary genre. In
addition, there are paintings like the various works entitled "Peaceable
Kingdom" by Edward Hicks (1780-1849). Finally, intentional
communities, which were once called utopian experiments, are also
WHAT IS A UTOPIA?
appropriately included (See Sargent, "The Intersection of Utopianism
and Communitarianism").
Fourth, scholarship in the field is often based on very limited
reading within the genre, which means that simple descriptions are
given of a complex phenomenon. In other cases, definitions that are
appropriate for the particular time and place on which the author
focuses do not comfortably fit other times and places 2. For example,
one of the best studies of early utopianism, J.C. Davis's Utopia and lhe
Ideal Society (1981) defines utopia as one of five subcategories of ideal
society thinking (cockaygne, arcadia, perfect moral commonwealth,
millennium, and utopia). The distinctions that Davis makes work for
the period he covers (1516-1700), but I have found them much harder
to apply to later utopianism, particularly the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries.
The most basic aspect of the topic is what I call utopianism or
social dreaming. Every country, every culture, will have some way of
social dreaming, dreaming about a better way of life, whether it be in
the past, the future, after death, or whatever. This indicates that we must
be ready to accept that utopias will not ali look alike. For example, there
are different versions of life after death; the Native American Indian's
version is radically different from that of most Christian versions,
and the Christian version of Dante's time is very different from the
dominant Christian version of today. Paradise for one people or time is
not Paradise for another people or time.
It is instructive to look at two definitions from early scholars.
Joyce Oramel Hertzler defines utopias by identifying a "distinctive
characteristic" of More's Utopia, saying ". . . More depicted a perfect,
and perhaps unrealizable, society, located in nowhere, purged of the
shortcomings, the wastes, and the confusion of our own time and living
in perfect adjustment, full of happiness and contentment". J. Max
Patrick also based his definition on More, saying:
. . . a utopia conforms to certain basic features of More's Libellus,
which gave the genre its name. A utopia should describe in a variety of aspects
and with some consistency an imaginary state or society which is regarded as
better, in some respects at least, than the one in which its author lives. He does
not ordinarily claim that the fictitious society and its people are perfect in ali
respects and that he is propounding a total ideal or model to strive toward or
imitate; most utopias are presented not as models of unrealistic perfection but
as alternatives to the familiar, as norms by which to judge existing societies,
as exercises in extrapolation to discover the social and other implications of
realizing certain theories, principies and projects.
But these definitions, on the surface the same, differ in one very
important way; Hertzler's utopias are perfect and Patrick's are not.
Candid Suggestions in Eight
Letters to Soame Jenkins, Esq.
(London, 1782), 169-72. John
Stuart Mill used "dys-topian"
in the House of Commons.
Hansard (12 March 1868, page
1517, column 1) reports him
saying "I may be permitted,
as one who, in common with
many of my betters, have been
subjected to the charge of
being Utopian, to congratulate
the Government on having
joined that goocily company. It
is, perhaps, too complimentary
to call them Utopians, they
ought rather to be cafied dystopians, or cacotopians. What
is cornmonly called Utopian
is something too good to be
practicable, but what they
appear to favour is too bad
to be practicable." According
to the OED, Cacotopia was
first used by Jeremy Bentham
in his Plan of Parliamentary
Reform, in the Form of a
Catechism (1818).
Utopian satire: a nonexistent society described
in considerable detail and
normafiy located in time and
space that the author intended
a contemporaneous reader
to view as a criticism of that
contemporary society.
Anti-utopia: a non-existent
society described in
considerable detail and
normally located in time
and space that the author
intended a contemporaneous
reader to view as a criticism
of utopianism or of some
particular eutopia.
Criticai utopia: a nonexistent society described
in considerable detail and
normally located in time
and space that the author
intended a contemporaneous
reader to view as better than
contemporary society but with
clifficult problems that the
described society may or may
not be able to solve and which
takes a criticai view of lhe
utopian genre.
Criticai dystopia: a nonexistent society described
in considerable detail and
normally located in time
and space that the author
intended a contemporaneous
reader to view as worse than
155
LYMAN TOWER SARGENT
contemporary society but that
normally includes at least one
eutopian enclave or holds out
hope that the dystopia can be
overcome and replaced with a
eutopia.
Flawed utopia: works that
present what appears to
be a good society until the
reader leams of some flaw
that raises questiona about
the basis for its cáim to
be a good society, or even
turns it into a dystopia. The
flawed utopia tenda to invade
territory already occupied by
the dystopia, the anti-utopia,
and the criticai utopia and
dystopia. The flawed utopia
is a sub-type that can exist
within any of these subgenres.
Intentional community: a
group of five or more adults
and their children, if any, who
come from more than one
nuclear family and who have
chosen to live together to
enhance their shared values
or for some other mutually
agreed upon purpose. The
temi appears to have been
first used in the 1940s.
With the exception of ''critical
dystopia", these definitions
are from my "The Three Faces
of Utopianism Revisited".
Although I have used my own
definition, "criticai dystopia"
is based on Moylan's Scraps
of the Untainted Sky and
Baccolini's "Gender and
Genre in the Feminist Criticai
Dystopias of Katharine
Burdekin, Margaret Atwood,
and Octavia Butler." "Flawed
utopia" comes from my
"The Problem of the 'Flawed
Utopia— . Other definitional
articles include Levitas,
Poggioli, Quarta, Sawada, and
Suvin.
The first study of utopias
appears to be Ahlefeld (1704).
For overviews of utopian
scholarship, see Stillman
(1990) and Widdicombe (1992).
2
156
starting at the logical starting point, we are faced with a dispute over the
nature of utopia. And the difference is important because the equation
has been used by Karl Popper and others to dismiss utopianism as the
equivalent of totalitarianism.
Patrick is right, and Hertzler is quite simply wrong. More's own
work does not describe a perfect society by any definition of perfect that
I can find. In English "perfect" refers to something finished, complete,
unchanging, and Utopia certainly does not fit that definition. I also
believe that More, as a good Christian, could not imagine a "perfect"
society; the sinful nature of the human race would preclude that. And
there are very few utopias in the corpus that can reasonably be described
as "perfect," and most of those are in some version of heaven.
If we look more closely at the issue, we can see that there are two
possible versions of perfection, perfect people and a perfect society. In
both cases, the dominant tendency within utopianism is against these
types of perfection.
The flaw in the presumably perfect has deep roots in utopianism.
Aristophanes (448?-380? BCE), the first great anti-utopian, presents
this argument in his Ecclesiazusae ar Women in Parliament (393 BCE)
where a group of women take over the legislative assembly and enact
a form of communism. Their legislation fails not because it is bad
but because the human race is not capable of the required altruism.
Aristophanes made a similar point in Platus (388 BCE) where the
blind god of wealth is given sight, whereupon he redistributes wealth to
the deserving. Human greed rapidly redistributes it again inequitably.
Given the importance of Christianity in the Western utopian tradition,
it is hardly surprising that attempts to achieve perfection in this life
are sometimes presented as failures. Medieval Christianity generally
reflected the position of St. Augustine (354-430) that life in this world
was conditioned by the Fali and sin. As a result, the possibility of
significant social improvement was limited at best, and much medieval
utopianism was explicitly heretical (On heresy and utopianism, see, for
example, Moinar). No Christian can believe that perfection on this Earth
or in this life is possible before the Second Coming or the MWennium.
This did not stop thinkers from developing utopian imagery, but it had
to be displaced in some way, such as in the rediscovered Garden of
Eden, the Kingdom of Prester John, St. Brandan's Isle, or the like.
For the Christian, apparent perfection must be flawed or even a
delusion foisted upon unsuspecting people by Satan or the Antichrist.
For example, this is the explicit theme ofJames Blish's (1921-75)A Case
of Conscience (1958), where the planet is destroyed because its apparent
perfection must be the work of Satan.
The earliest modern example of a flawed utopia is Samuel
WHAT IS A UTOPIA?
Johnson's (1709-84) The Prince of Abissinia (1759), better known as
Rasselas, a title first used in 1787. The eutopia, Happy Valley, intended
to provide a perfect life for the children of an emperor, seems dull
to Rasselas, and he chooses to explore the world. While after many
adventures he concludes that the Happy Valley compares favorably to
the world, Johnson was one of the first to raise the issue of the potential
boredom faced by the inhabitants of a eutopia.
In contemporary science fiction, perfect people are usually
brought about through eugenics or, more recently, genetic manipulation.
The point is generally quite simple and harks back to the Christian
critique of utopianism. The "perfect people" fail because they inevitably
bring with them the taint of the past, an ineradicable "human nature"
(See Sargent 1975 and 1977), no longer called "sin" but that is implied,
and it ensures that human beings cannot be perfect. An example is
Robert Lieberman's (1941-) Perfict People (1986).
The other category, the imperfect society, occurs primarily in
the twentieth century because the imperfect perfection is most often
brought about by technology. H.G. Wells is an early twentieth-century
example of someone deeply ambivalent about the ability of science and
technology to bring about a better society (See Sargent 1984), and it is
a common theme in science fiction (See Sargent 1981). One example
is Michael Frayn's (1933-) A Very Private Life (1968), which presents a
highly developed technology that is intended to produce a eutopia but
results in a dystopia of complete personal isolation.
Another issue that should now be settled is whether utopias are
a Westem phenomenon or if there are nonwestern utopian traditions
that developed separately from the Western tradition. It is clear that
there are such traditions. Even if we include the Islamic tradition in the
West, there are such traditions in China and India. In fact, every culture
that has been examined with care by scholars has been shown to have a
utopian tradition to some degree.
But this brings us back to definitional questions and the tendency
to conflate utopia and utopianism. To what extent does something
have to resemble More's Utopia to be considered a utopia? Would we
recognize a utopia produced in a radically different culture as a utopia?
This forces us to ask, What is the essence of a utopia? To me, there are
two central aspects of a utopia, both of which must be there. First, the
society described must not edst; second, the author must in some way
evaluate that society.
But authors sometimes challenge even these most basic
characteristics. Most utopias are located in time and space to provide
verisimilitude, to make our suspension of disbelief more willing. For
example, More's Utopia and most early post-More utopias were located
157
LYMAN TOWER SARGENT
in relatively unexplored areas of earth. Later, utopias were placed in
the future but with a defined past that led to that future. With the
development of science fiction as a genre within which utopias were
published, the direct connection to the past often became more tenuous,
but throughout the history of the utopian genre, most utopias have been
non-existent but closely connected to some reality.
And given the importance of satire within the utopian genre,
the fact that most utopias are evaluative turns out to be not as simple a
point as might first appear (On satire, see Elliott). Again, More led the
way. What are we to make of a country called No Place with a major
river called No Water? And scholars still disagree fundamentally over
what institutions of Utopia, if any, More meant to be taken seriously.
Did Saint Thomas More really belief in euthanasia? Also, one person's
eutopia may well be another's dystopia. For example, B.F. Skinner's
(1904-90) Walden Two (1948) clearly describes what Skinner and many
others saw to be a eutopia but which many critics saw as a dystopia.
What then can we conclude regarding the question asked in my
title? It seems to me that the reality of actual utopias and utopianism
force us to accept that one term does not fit ali, that scholarship must be
much more careful about the terms used than has been the case in the
past. In particular, scholars need to stop using the words "perfect" and
perfection" in connection with utopias.
There is a utopian literary genre, but it has many parts, and
authors continue to push at whatever porous boundaries scholars want
to put around the genre. There is also a phenomenon that can be called
utopianism that appears to be universal and again has many parts, many
ways it is expressed.
Thus, scholars must be very careful to be explicit about what they
are studying, what aspects of utopianism interest them, what part of the
utopian literary genre the works that interests them belongs to. Thomas
More provided us with a complex text that still defies agreement. We
should honor More by recognizing the complex, many-faceted legacy
that has grown from his original play on words.
ll
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WHAT IS A UTOPIA?
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