Utopian Writers and Philosophy in 17th-Century England

Defining Utopia: Competing Scholarly Perspectives

The stereotypical concept of utopia in the minds of the average citizen in contemporary society is that of a lovely paradise where life flows freely, there is no work to do, the weather is always gorgeous, stress and pressure are non-existent, and happy days are endless. However, this description reveals naivety for several reasons. First, utopian philosophies in most cases are not about giving humans a free ride in some fantasy world. Second, there are myriad definitions of utopia and numerous social and moral reasons why writers and philosophers advanced utopian ideas. Third, even scholars and literary icons disagree as to what utopia means and how it should be integrated into literary and social studies.

This paper reviews and analyzes the utopian literature and ideas put forth by writers and philosophers of the seventeenth century, examining them through the perspectives of literary critics and the writers who carved out utopian ideology and circumstance. It is a fact expressed by many scholars and authors that pinning down a definition of utopia is an exercise in opinion rather than substantive fact.

Ruth Levitas, who has taught courses on utopia as a lecturer in Sociology and helped launch the Utopian Studies Society in the UK, asserts in her book The Concept of Utopia (1990) — reviewed in Science Fiction Studies by Tom Moylan — that the "validity of utopia" is not "escapist nonsense but a significant part of human culture" (Moylan 1992). While Levitas praises the "vitality of utopian studies" and admires the "rich diversity of recent work," she also expresses concern that an expanded investigation into utopia conducted outside a thorough historical context could result in "creative disorder or debilitating confusion." Her concern is grounded in her belief that any general definition of utopia "needs to accommodate a wide variety of methods and objects"; she fears there will be — and perhaps already are — "rigid and narrow formulations" of utopia. To engage in a worthwhile intellectual discussion of the subject, she asserts, one cannot cast any definition in terms of "content, form, or even function," because "all three change with each historical context."

What, then, is utopia in Levitas' view? Moylan explains that Levitas has chosen to relate to utopia "in terms of the central characteristic of desire: 'the desire for a better being'" (p. 199 of The Concept of Utopia). A more elaborate definition by Levitas — incorporating "desire" as a central theme — is that utopia "arises not from a 'natural' impulse subject to social mediation, but as a socially constructed response to an equally constructed gap between the needs and wants generated by a particular society and the satisfactions available to and distributed by it" (Moylan 1992). In other words, the distance between what a culture needs and what it wants can be bridged through the construction of a utopian vision.

In James Holstun's book A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America, the author offers a historical review of utopia as a blend of philosophy and literature, beginning with Socrates in Book 6 of the Republic. Socrates suggests there that Greece must institute a "carefully applied program of educational discipline" (Holstun 36) that will allow philosophers to reform the entire state, one person at a time. But before that reform can take place, Socrates argued, the "proper utopian raw materials" must be given to the populace. The utopian philosophers will then "take the city and characters of men, as if they were a tablet, and wipe them clean — no easy task." Socrates envisioned philosophers constantly "rubbing out and correcting their image of the ideal character and state according to their divine pattern," as Holstun paraphrases. However, Socrates' idea of a utopian Greek society failed to include "practical method[s] for erasing previous ideological contamination from the minds of his pupils" (Holstun 36); hence, the great philosopher's plan for dramatic reform was "doomed," Holstun writes.

Although Sir Thomas More was not a seventeenth-century writer, he is generally credited among scholars with launching the concept of utopia and indeed authoring the word itself — from the Greek meaning "no place" — in his 1516 philosophical treatise Utopia. The key to understanding More's utopian presentation lies in his description of three forces that author J.C. Davis describes as "inducing men to behave in a socially acceptable way," thereby allowing a "stable and healthy society" to emerge. Those three forces are: one, "law and the sanctions behind it"; two, "informal social pressure" (i.e., public opinion regarding accepted norms of behavior); and three, "conscience, the small voice within, be it the voice of God or the voice of society internalized" (Davis 46). According to Davis, the utopians in More's work were not ideal men or even "eminently reasonable men," since they were capable of falling from good standing and prepared for war even while denouncing it as a solution. More's utopia (as Davis paraphrases on page 56) was the development of a social order "in which harmony was ensured in such a way that law and social pressure confirmed the dictates of conscience."

As professor Daniel Bender explains in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, More's Utopia embraces the idea of "practical wisdom" and blends it into a "bold, visionary social policy" (Bender 2003). Far from a dreamland paradise, More's utopia is a society in which "rational solutions" are offered to "perennial social problems" — including a fair taxation policy, prudent strategies for food storage, premarital requirements to ensure the stability of marriages, a studied tolerance of religious differences, and socially engineered attitudes designed to prevent avarice (achieved, for instance, by casting chamber pots from solid gold).

In his book Utopia and the Ideal Society, J.C. Davis asks such questions as, "Why did some people or groups in society abandon reality in order to engage in utopian dreaming?" (Davis 1981, p. 6). He also asks what kinds of "social frustration, blockage, aspiration and dysfunction" such work represented, and how "the evolution of these patterns correspond[ed] with social change." In the course of his research, Davis became "uneasy" regarding the simplistic generalization that there was always an evident juxtaposition of "social realism" and "utopian dreaming" (7). He found no "social consistency" among the various utopian presentations, nor an abundance of utopian thinkers whose lives "were devoted to a single vision" (7).

Despite his dissatisfaction with the dearth of straightforward explanations, Davis dedicated the first chapter of his book to the search for a definition, using twenty-eight pages to make the point that there are no simple definitions of utopia. He writes on page 38 that while utopias are not always given the form of literary fiction, "they are always conceived as total schemes, which distinguishes them from other forms of political writing." These utopian schemes are preoccupied with "detail" and attempt to "project a total social environment" (Davis 38). He further identifies three "cardinal characteristics of the utopian form" — "totality, order, perfection" — which are so thoroughly interrelated that they seem to be "aspects of the same phenomenon." Davis concludes that the definition of utopia "as a type of ideal society" distinguished by "its approach to the collective problem" and its vision of "a total, perfect, ordered environment" must be "validated by its correspondence to the classic sources of the utopian tradition."

Historian and professor J.H. "Jack" Hexter wrote that "Utopia implies that the nature of man is such that to rely on individual conscience to supply the deficiencies of municipal law is to embark on the bottomless sea of human sinfulness in a sieve." Utopians, Hexter believed, approach conscience with "legal sanctions." In a "properly ordered society," he asserted, the "massive force of public law performs the function which in natural law theory ineptly is left altogether to a small voice so often still" (Davis 56).

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. New Atlantis. 1626.

Bender, Daniel. "Sir Thomas More." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 281: British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500–1660, Second Series. Ed. Edward A. Malone. Gale Group, 2003, pp. 201–214.

Campanella, Tommaso. "On State Controlled Marriage." Excerpted from City of the Sun in Total Commonwealths.

Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1700. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Eliot, John. "The Christian Commonwealth." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 24: American Colonial Writers, 1606–1734. Ed. Emory Elliott. The Gale Group, 1984, pp. 109–116.

Garrett, J.S. Utopias in Literature since the Romantic Period. 1968.

Holstun, James. A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America. Oxford University Press, 1987.

Little, William, et al. The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1933.

Moylan, Tom. "Utopian Studies: Sharpening the Debate." Science Fiction Studies 19.1 (1992).

Patrick, Max. "A Biography of Francis Bacon: Chapter VII." Our Civilization.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985. Garland Publishing, 1988.

Sutherland, Christine Mason. "Mary Astell: Reclaiming Rhetorica in the Seventeenth Century." Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 93–116.

Wu, Qingyun. Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias. Syracuse University Press, 1995.