Utopia

Utopia, concept of an ideal society.

The word “utopia” was coined by Sir Thomas More in his work Utopia (1516), from Greek terms meaning “no” and “place”. However, many consider the concept to have been in existence long before More. One example is the biblical Garden of Eden, which represents a natural utopia now lost. Another, The Republic of Plato, sees Plato seeming to invite philosophers to establish an ideal state, whereas More describes an imaginary society without the inequalities of money and status which characterized his own Tudor England. These cases illustrate three different functions of utopia in literature and philosophy. An author may intend a utopia as a nostalgic vision, a feasible social experiment, or a form of social criticism. The allure of an ideal society often makes it difficult to tell whether or not it is intended as a genuine possibility.

The inspiration of a utopia has not been confined to the realm of ideas. Actual communities have been founded as utopias throughout history, including the Essene communities, the model industrial towns of Robert Owen, and the Israeli kibbutzim. Few of these communities, however, could withstand the tension between their own ideal principles and the pressures from the unreformed outer world which governed the desires and habits of their inhabitants. The problem of how to found a radically new society from scratch, with people who have grown up in existing societies, has plagued all attempts to establish utopias. Insofar as drastic methods of purging society have seemed necessary for founding utopias, fear of these methods has also inspired recurrent works of anti-utopianism. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) is a classic example of anti-utopianism, condemning a purportedly ideal society in which language itself is twisted for political ends.