APPELBAUM, Robert. Utopia and Utopianism PDF

Utopia and Utopianism
Oxford Handbooks Online

Robert Appelbaum
The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640
Edited by Andrew Hadfield
Print Publication Date: Jun 2013

Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - Early and Medieval, Literary Studies - Fiction, Novelists,
and Prose Writers
Online Publication Date: Aug 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199580682.013.0017
Abstract and Keywords
This article charts the variety and complexity of the Utopian tradition in English. It
discusses the sources and intertextualities of Utopia and its utopian project, in other
words the other texts and historical developments utopia is in dialogue with; the
continued development of the utopian framework of thought from 1516 to 1640; and the
dialectic of engagement and disengagement that utopianism imposes on people who
would respond to it, whether for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries or for the
present.
Keywords: Utopian tradition, English prose, utopian project, utopianism, engagement
‘UTOPIA’ is the name of a book, the name of an imaginary island, and the name of an
idea. Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) is responsible for the first two and indirectly for the
third one as well. In 1516 he published, in Latin, Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris
quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia, which can be
literally translated as A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Salubrious than Festive, of the
Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia. ‘Utopia’ is Greek for ‘No Place’,
with a pun on the word ‘Eutopia’, which is Greek for ‘Happy Place’. The island does not
exist, but it is ‘new’, or at least new to us, and it comes to our attention in the context of a
treatment of ‘the best state of a republic’. In fact, the book generally called Utopia is
divided into two parts; the first part involves a discussion among learned men of ‘the best
state of a republic’; the second part involves a description of a ‘new island’ which seems
to answer the requirements of a ‘best state of a republic’, although the narrator of the
book (a fictionalized Thomas More) begs to differ. ‘I cannot agree and consent to all
things’ that were said about how the island is run, the narrator says. ‘I must needs
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confess and grant that many things be in the Utopian weal-public which in our cities I
may rather wish for than hope after.’1
So, going back to 1516, Utopia is a book and Utopia is an imaginary island. But by the
early seventeenth century, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, the word came
to indicate a pair of complementary ideas: either ‘any imaginary, indefinitely-remote
region, country, or locality’ or else ‘a place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of
politics, laws, customs, and conditions’. The word was generalized, sometimes as a term
of praise and sometimes as a term of abuse—for to call an idea or a proposal a ‘utopia’
could mean that it was ludicrously impractical—and used to indicate the object of either
of two kinds, or both kinds at once, of what would still later be called utopianism.
Discussions of utopia and utopianism are inescapably complicated by this multiplicity of

meanings: a book, an imaginary island, an ideal state, any imaginary island, any (p. 254)
ideal state, and any or all of these things in relation to the many-sided impulse that we
call ‘utopianism’. Discussions will further be complicated by the attitudes we bring to
bear upon utopianism. If one imagines that history is progressive, that it is potentially
progressive, or that it ought to be progressive, and if one thinks of progress as the
achievement, so far as possible, of a ‘best state’ run according to principles of universal
justice, one may well discuss utopia and utopianism as a legacy and a hope. What Thomas
More first started (though not without plenty of precedents, as we will see) was a project
as yet incomplete and what we learn from studying that project in the documents of the
past is, among other things, how to keep the project going. But if one is sceptical about
the idea of progress and if one thinks that one ought to study history and texts on their
own terms, in view of their immediate circumstances without regard to subsequent
developments or one's own political inclination, then there is nothing, in a word, ‘utopian’
about studying utopia and utopianism. Studying them might well elucidate many things
about the period in which they are found to occur and may help one understand how texts
work and a certain range of ideas can be developed, but they are not a legacy and they
are not a source of hope; they are only what they are.
Total engagement in a project of utopianism, for which More's Utopia is a foundational

text, or total disengagement from such a project in the name of clarity of intellectual
purpose—these are not the only two alternatives available. Surely, there are shades of
engagement and disengagement between the two extremes and there are other ways of
going about the study of utopia and utopianism entirely. But the two extremes are
indicative of the main challenge to interpretative thought that utopia and utopianism
present, and not just to us, in the twenty-first century: for the two extremes of
engagement and disengagement inherent to the utopian project challenged thinkers of
More's own time and for many years to follow; in fact, they are embedded in the
construction of the book, Utopia, itself.
What follows is a discussion, then, of three things: the sources and intertextualities of
Utopia and its utopian project, in other words the other texts and historical developments
utopia is in dialogue with; the continued development of the utopian framework of
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thought from 1516 to 1640; and the dialectic of engagement and disengagement that
utopianism imposes on people who would respond to it, whether for the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries or for us.
16.1 Influences, intertexualities, and meaning

At least four kinds of sources of influence can be found in the original Utopia. Chief
among them may be what the original title alludes to when it refers to the ‘best state of
the republic’. The tradition begins with Plato (c.428–348 bce) and Aristotle (384–322
bce), and most especially with Plato's Republic (c.380 bce). This is a tradition, in the first
(p. 255) place, of the philosophical dialogue; all of the first part of Utopia is a
philosophical dialogue in the Platonic mould. But it is a tradition as well of thinking about
human community as a political society; the original Greek title (not necessarily the title
Plato wanted to give it, but the one handed down by tradition) is Πολιτεία, ‘Of the City’,
or more accurately, ‘Of the City-State’. Whether in the form of a city-state or some larger
entity that can be called a regional or imperial ‘state’ (in Latin either civitas or
respublica), when society is thought of as a ‘state’ it is thought of as an entity of more or
less consensual association, where the power of making laws and enforcing them is
vested in its institutions and appointed officials. Plato and Aristotle both take the
existence of the state for granted, but as they enquire into the nature of the state they
also enquire into the nature of the ‘best state’; indeed, for both philosophers, to enquire
into one is to enquire into the other, for to know what a thing like a state is requires
knowing what a thing like a state ought to be. Plato and Aristotle gave various answers to
the question of the best state and were in disagreement on many issues, but they both
saw that the perfection of the state relied on the state's living up to the principle of
universal justice. Aristotle thus underlined the importance of what he called ‘distributive
justice’, the fair distribution of wealth, goods, and social capital among all the citizens of
the state. Plato went further and advocated communism.
A second tradition to which More responds is Christian. There seems little question that
one of the things More had in mind when he developed his description of the island of
Utopia was the prosperous medieval monastery, with its carefully regulated life, its
collectivist spirit, its shared labour and meals, its mixed economy, and—for this is a
central part of life in Utopia—its piety. Behind the monastic tradition lay the notion of the
early Christian communities mentioned in the New Testament. It is said of one of these
communities, ‘Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were
possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were
sold, And laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man
according as he had need.’2 But the founding of this communist community in the Bible is
a spontaneous, voluntary, and collective act. In a monastery, entry to which often involved
the renunciation of all one's worldly possessions, communal life was compulsory and (in
principle) strictly enforced. So it is in Utopia. Utopia enlists the free will of all its
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inhabitants; without that free will the utopian project would fall apart. The government of
the nation is republican. But Utopia was founded—being similar in this respect to many
monastic orders—by a single charismatic and authoritarian leader, Utopus, who
established the laws of the new republic, and Utopia is controlled as much by the
enforcement of its laws as by the consent of the governed. Many of its laws, when looked
at closely, are actually quite restrictive, and offences against the law can lead to forced
servitude and even capital punishment.
Much of this serious business of political and economic idealism, and of a strictly
enforced legal code, however, is mitigated by way of a third kind of influence that More
(p. 256) clearly draws upon, the comical or satirical fantasy. When Plato was a young man
and the real-life Socrates was holding forth in the marketplace of Athens, there was
already a form of writing that made fun of utopianism. It appears most prominently in the
comedies of Aristophanes (446–386 bce); for example, in The Birds (414 bce), where an
Athenian, in an absurd response to the political problems of the day, convinces the birds
of the area to form their own city in the sky, called Cloudcuckooland. It is hard to
establish with certainty what speculative ideas about the city-state Aristophanes was
poking fun at, but we can see that by Aristophanes's time a literary tradition was already
afloat, where writers at once registered the utopian impulse and mocked it. In the third
century BC there flourished in the Greek world a ‘cynic’ philosopher named Menippus of
Gadara who further developed the genres of social satire in a utopian mould. His writings
are now lost, but they had a direct influence on the work of Lucian of Samosata (125–
180), a favourite of Thomas More and his good friend, the Dutch humanist Desiderius
Erasmus (1466–1536). Among Lucian's works was Menippus, a dialogue where the cynic
philosopher visits the underworld and sees established a new decree to punish men of
wealth in the afterlife for having been wealthy, and A True Story, a rambunctious
narrative involving, among other things, a trip to the moon and a view of the puny and
ridiculous earth of men from the point of view of the heavens.
‘Menippean Satire’, as literary critics are inclined to call it today—a satire of attitudes
and ideas, rather than people, articulated through playful narrative, dialogue, or verse,
and often openly implausible—was an important part of the humanist project of early
modernity. In 1511 Erasmus published Moriae encomium, punning on the name of his
friend Thomas More, to whom he dedicated the book; or, in English, The Praise of Folly.
In The Praise of Folly, the person Folly herself speaks and argues, foolishly, on behalf of
what she stands for, though in the end she makes serious points about religious worship
and love, and all along the Folly's praise of herself has important things to say about the
human condition. Thomas More's Utopia is in some respects a response to The Praise of
Folly. It is certainly an attempt to experiment with the genre of the Menippean Satire in
the wake of what Erasmus had already done with it and to write something that was both
foolish and wise, addressing itself, through the ironies of satiric form, to practical and
serious business of human society. Critics today are apt to speak of the attitude of works
like The Praise of Folly and Utopia as ‘jocoserious’, calling attention to the in-betweenness
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of the discourse, an indefiniteness in attitude and meaning that cannot, and is not
supposed to be, ever resolved. Utopia is a form of textual play. Utopia is a joke, even if
there is much that Utopia is serious about. And that is one of the main reasons why it can
be said that Utopia requires a mixture of engagement and disengagement.
But if Utopia comments playfully on the human condition, in the spirit of the wild tales
and dialogues of Lucian, it also addresses itself to some important historical
developments. London in More's day and age was becoming ever more a thriving urban
centre; and his Utopia is a predominantly urban society. England under Henry VIII was
aspiring to be a world power and constantly intervening, belligerently, in the affairs on
the Continent and Ireland; and so too, Utopia gets involved, with arms, in foreign affairs
across the sea. The first stirrings of the Reformation were beginning to be felt; Luther
(p. 257) would publicize his Ninety-Five Theses just a year after the publication of Utopia
and Erasmus himself, though he would never become a Protestant, was an advocate of
reform. So too, in an Erasmian spirit, with an emphasis on natural piety, Utopia is
religiously experimental. Even more important, it would seem, for the interlocutors in
Utopia discuss this at some length, there was an economic development to respond to:
economic modernization was putting pressure on the old peasantry of More's England
and controversies over ‘enclosure’, the practice of landlords of fencing off parts of their
land for their own use, to the detriment of tenant farmers who had traditionally used such
lands ‘in common’, were becoming widespread. Obviously, Utopia has solved such
problems by abolishing private property, so that, in principle, absolutely everything, apart
from people themselves, are held ‘in common’. Utopia is a predominantly urban society
which has solved the agrarian problem through the state-wide abolition of private
property and the republican, egalitarian administration of the common weal.
But there was one development more. All of these historical phenomena—the growth of
London and urbanism generally, the new English interest in foreign affairs, religious
experimentation and debate on the eve of the Reformation, and the modernization of the
English economy at the expense of traditional peasants and the feudal system to which
they were accustomed—came at the time of the Age of Discovery. The news of Columbus's
first voyage had only arrived in England twenty-three years earlier and the nature of
much of the world outside of the Old World still remained, for Europeans, a matter of
conjecture. England involved itself in the Age of Discovery on a national level from 1497,
when Henry VII sponsored the journey across the Atlantic undertaken by the Italian John
Cabot, and though England wasn’t very good at taking advantage of discovery or
colonization until the seventeenth century, plans for exploration and colonial expansion
were always afoot.
More's Utopia takes a good deal of its inspiration from Amerigo Vespucci's Lettera delle
isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (1504–5), possibly by way of a Latin
translation that appeared in 1507. Raphael Hytholday, the traveller in Utopia, is said to
have been one of the crew members on Amerigo Vespucci's last expedition who were
voluntarily left behind in the New World (so that Hythloday had a chance to move about
and explore things on his own). The island of Utopia may be ‘no place’, but it is certainly
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a part of the New World that was still being explored in More's day. Utopia inserts the
fictional island into the non-fictional, but still poorly understood, geography of the
Americas, in which a crewman of Vespucci might have travelled. And More is clearly
responding to an element of Vespucci's letters which make the New World at once
attractive and challenging. Parts of the New World, for Vespucci, bring to mind the
Golden Age of classical legend, when people were both simpler and more virtuous, and
both poverty and wealth were unknown. So the New World can be a place that excites the
moral imagination. Its newness can be an innocence. But the New World can also stand
as a rebuke to the Old, since its virtue may be held to contrast more than a little
favourably with the corrupt life of advanced society in Europe. In a famous essay
originally published in 1578, ‘Of Cannibals’, the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–
92) made this rebuke explicit; the barbarity of the inhabitants of the New World, he
asserted, was (p. 258) nothing compared to the barbarity of so-called civilized people,
doing what they believe their civility warrants them to do—like persecuting each other
because of religious differences. More doesn’t go quite that far; but he does explore the
possibility that a people of a New World, without the benefit of European civilization, and
even without the benefit of revealed religion, might nevertheless live more wholesomely
and even more piously than their European counterparts. Although it is a joke, Utopia is
also a rebuke.
So there are four of the main influences behind the invention of Utopia: philosophical
speculation about the ‘best state’; the communal life of the monastic orders; Menippean
Satire with its comic dialogues and fantastic adventures; and the real-world literature of
discovery and exploration. Put the four together, along with such ancillary concerns as
urbanization, and you have the essential building blocks of Utopia. But if you do put the
four together, as More has done, you have the makings for what is at once a highly
coherent and convincing bipartite exposition—first a philosophical discussion among
interlocutors about politics and then a description of the island of Utopia that is intended
empirically to prove the main points of the discussion—and a very unstable idea. Utopia
seems to give hope. With one hand it seems to say, here is a new possibility, a new way of
thinking about the world, a new way of imagining collective life, where reason and piety
rule rather than convention and passion, and the good of the community rules over the
pursuit of private self-interest. Let us renew ourselves. But with the other hand the text
seems to say, don’t take this new way of thinking terribly seriously. That's not the point.
In the final analysis, there is nothing certain about the certainties of the New World and
the imaginary paradises with which we would like to populate it.
So the meaning of Utopia, in short, inspiring though it may be, is inherently indefinite and
unstable. More himself signals this to the reader with his infamous word-play. Utopia is
No Place. Hythloday, the main speaker of the dialogue, is (in Greek) a ‘Peddlar of
Nonsense’. And there is more to the indefiniteness besides word-play. So far as Utopia is
meant to entail not a description of a real place, or even a place that is to be ‘hoped
after’, but rather a satirical commentary on real-world Europe, its main meaning would
seem to consist in that which it attacks. But it is hard to determine exactly what it is that
Utopia attacks. As soon as one tries to establish the exact targets of Utopia's satire, one
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gets caught up in the same back-and-forth of jocoseriousness as the book itself

deliberately dallies with. Utopia is against private property, but maybe not really. Utopia
is against the Catholic religion as currently practised in the early sixteenth century, but
maybe not really. Utopia is against the modern world of mercantilism, monarchy,
urbanism, and High Church Catholicism, but maybe not really. More was himself a high-
ranking state official, working for a powerful king, and he was both a representative of
the rising mercantile class and a devout Catholic. Besides, just look at Utopia itself: it is
full of self-contradictions. It is a nation without any laws, but it actually has plenty of
laws. It is a nation that has abolished capital punishment; but it actually practises capital
punishment. It is a nation where everything and everyone are alike, equal in dignity. But
in fact, there are all kinds of inequalities of dignity and even of power and possession in
the island. Perhaps Utopia is not so utopian after all . . .
(p. 259) 16.2 Subsequent developments

Utopia was famous from the day of its appearance in print. Some people seem to have
been fooled by it, believing that Utopia was an actual island somewhere in the Americas.
After all, More had apparently spoken in his own voice in the text; he had made several
real people, including himself, the speakers of the dialogue, Raphael Hythloday apart;
and he had framed the dialogue by a picture of real events of the day. But eventually, the
idea took hold: Utopia was jocoserious and there was no such thing as Utopia. What
seemed to be important about the text was the utopian idea—a point of view about the
real world that was not of this world, not confined to its received ideas and dogmatic
conventions. And what seemed to be important as well was its utopian jocoseriousness—a
way of engaging in literary play, where one both speculated and mocked, where one both
asserted and denied. The most famous of all responses to Utopia in this respect was
Gargantua and Pantagruel by the French writer François Rabelais (1494–1553); the First
Book of Rabelais's four-volume romp3 includes a description of the ideal society of the
Abbey of Thélème, a place where men and women live together for the sake of pleasure
and self-fulfilment, and the guiding principle of life is ‘Do What Thou Wilt’. The Second
and Third Books contain a number of allusions to the island from Utopia, where the hero
Pantagruel is said to have been born, and the Fourth Book tells the tale of a fantastic
voyage to islands where the rules of life are vastly different from our own, in a mock-
heroic search for what is called the Oracle of the Bottle.
So Rabelais absorbed much of the spirit of Utopia and made it much his own. But if
meaning is unstable in Utopia, in Gargantua and Pantagruel it is perhaps even more
unstable. Whereas Utopia is sometimes mildly humorous, Gargantua and Pantagruel
openly plays for laughs. Rabelais does not hesitate to sacrifice the seriousness of
humanist learning to the requirements of farce. And where More might seem to put
forward a programme for collective action, even if only half seriously, Rabelais cannot
seem to be doing anything of the kind. He is just expressing a fantasy, Do What Thou Wilt,
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and calling attention to the unpleasant fact that in the modern world one cannot do what
one would. It would be better if we could do what we would, Rabelais implies; think of the
possibilities. But we can’t. And in any case, though there were certainly some readers in
England who were familiar with Rabelais's work in French, none of it is was translated
into English and published in England until 1653; it would not be until 1694 that the
whole of Rabelais's output would be available in English. And, for the most part, writers
in England would take a much more cautious approach to the ambiguous jocoseriousness
inherent to the humanist utopian project, and a much more cautious approach as well to
the politics and social criticism inherent to the utopian project. English writers, generally
speaking, wanted to be engaged with the utopian project; but at the (p. 260) same time,
they seemed to want to disengage themselves from the radical implications of the project
and even, for the most part, from the radical implications of utopian textuality.
A case in point would be the first important work of social thought in England to follow in
Utopia's wake, Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour (1531).The Governour is a
much more conservative document than More's. It begins, indeed, by openly disavowing
communism and the notion of the republic that informs More's text, or for that matter
Plato's Republic, and it ends by promoting a humanist, courtly society, presided over by a
powerful monarch and a learned, professional ruling class, a society that is more familiar
from Erasmus's (non-satiric) Enchiridion militis Christiani (often translated as The
Education of the Christian Prince: 1503) or Baldassare Castiglione's relatively serious Il
Cortegiano (The Courtier: 1528) than from the Platonic–Morean tradition. The Governour
makes few jokes; it is not very playful; and instead of challenging the status quo of the
social order, though it recommends many reforms, and tries to find a new home for
learning and reason in society, it actually apologizes for many aspects of the status quo.
More akin to Utopia in form and spirit, though also much more earnest and far less
radical, are two political dialogues. The first of these, the Dialogue Between Cardinal Pole
and Thomas Lupset, by Thomas Starkey, was completed by 1533; it circulated in
manuscript only, not being printed until the nineteenth century. The two interlocutors of
the dialogue were historical figures, men of Starkey's acquaintance, who played a role in
negotiating the relation between church and state in response to reformist impulses both
of them shared and to Henry VIII's break from Rome, which Pole (like Thomas More
himself) could never fully subscribe to. The main speaker, Pole, is caused to argue in an
anti-ecclesiastic mode in favour of an Aristotelian ‘mixed monarchy’, with a strong
Parliament and a weak clerical presence, and to encourage a form of happiness in both
individuals and the state where the body and the soul are allowed equally to flourish.
Still more motivated by economic considerations was a second humanist dialogue,

Thomas Smith's Discourse of a Commonweal of this Realm in England. It was written in
1549, circulating (again) in manuscript, and found its way into print in 1581, four years
after Smith's death. Smith's Discourse is a dialogue between five different interlocutors,
representing different estates and trades, with a knight dominating the conversation. The
interlocutors are concerned about a current ‘dearth’ and troubled by the recent anti-
enclosure riots of 1549, which had broken out in several parts of England, climaxing in
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the protracted Kett's Rebellion in Smith's native East Anglia. The knight leads the
interlocutors in analysing the dearth and the discontent to which it has given rise, and
the problem, on the one hand, of inflation, and, on the other, of the natural avarice of
mankind. His solution is to regulate the economy by governmental policies that exploit
the selfish avarice of individuals for the sake of general prosperity and the common good.
Like Hythloday in Utopia, Smith's interlocutors are indignant over the displacement of
small landholders by great landlords seeking to maximize their profits by raising sheep
for wool for the export market. But Smith isn’t interested in what may be called utopian
solutions to the problem. In a later work, De Republica Anglorum (written in English,
(p. 261) despite its Latin title, and first published in 1583), an analysis of the English
constitution, Smith concludes by renouncing the ‘vaine imaginations, phantasies of

Philosophers’, including Plato, Xenophon, and More.4
Also in dialogue form, imitating a humanist exercise, but actually something quite
different, is Siuqila: Too Good to Be True, written by Thomas Lupton and printed in
London in 1580. It is the first work in English since Utopia to adopt the conceit of an
imaginary perfect commonwealth and the first to imitate More's word-play in its use of
proper names. Siuqila is the name of the main character—Siuqila being the Latin word
aliquis (‘somebody’) spelled backwards. He is an Englishman travelling around the world
who comes into contact with an individual named Omen—that is nemo (‘no one’). Omen
hails from the country of Mauqsun—that is, nusquam (‘nowhere’). Siuqila is not allowed
entry into Mauqsun; foreigners like him are considered too dangerous an influence. But
Omen is glad to spend a long while discussing the ‘wonderfull manners’ of the people of
Nowhere. As Siuqila never enters Mauqsun, the reader never gets to see it in operation,
and though Omen tells him a good deal about the laws and the behaviour of the people of
Mauqsun, he never actually describes the country. The text gestures mightily in the
direction of the genre of Utopia, but stops short of one of its most important features, the
description of the ideal republic. Yet, that is not the only major difference. Although the
dialogue works by pointing out the differences between a very real and troubled England
on the one hand and a well-nigh perfect imaginary commonwealth on the other, it does
not really stem from a deep humanist understanding of how societies operate. It is,
rather, a popular work, made to appeal to certain popular prejudices.
Too Good to Be True may perhaps be described as the first Puritan utopia—Puritan (for
us) in both an attractive and an unattractive sense. In its attractive aspects, the book
embraces Low Church evangelism, personal religion with emphasis on biblical study,
universal literacy, moral probity, and, above all, a species of communitarianism, motivated
by the rule of charity. As in Puritan leader John Winthrop's famous lay sermon A Modell of
Christian Charity, delivered aboard the Arabella en route from England to Massachusetts
(1630), poverty is not so much systematically eradicated in Too Good to Be True as
energetically mitigated. Almsgiving and charitable works are central to the moral
economy of the nation. But more unattractive, from our point of view, and no doubt from
the point of view of anti-Puritans of Tudor England as well, is the intolerance of the state
of Mauqsun, with its heavy-handed system of justice and its illiberal sanctimony.
Mauqsun, we learn, suffers from no crime, from no outbreaks of licentious or immodest
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behaviour, from no drunkenness or gluttony or irreverence or fornication. No one suffers

from the sins of greed, pride, idleness, dishonesty, or irresponsibility. And the reason for
such universal purity is that there are very strict, even harrowing laws against all crimes
and all sins, with penalties so severe, including capital punishment, that most citizens are
cowed into good behaviour, and those who aren’t are finally eliminated—mercilessly
executed. Simply to fail to educate one's young children, so that (p. 262) they cannot
recite the Lord's Prayer and Creed, is to expose oneself to very heavy fines; and if one
can’t pay the fines, one shall then ‘recyve twenties stripes, every moneth once, untill he
have trayned his children Chrisitianlye and obedientlye’.5 Meanwhile, to be convicted a
second time for the minor crime of usury, or for having borrowed money from a usurer, is
punishable by death. A commercial success, Too Good to Be True was also accompanied
by a sequel, The Second Part and Knitting Up of the Boke Entitled Too Good to Be True
(1581), which adds a few details but leaves the general picture unchanged. If life were
led really as we are encouraged to lead our lives by more earnest church officials and
other authorities today, by forces that would come to be associated with the word
‘puritanism’, life would be ‘too good to be true’—only Lupset and his readership clearly
‘wish for’ and maybe even ‘hope after’ a life of that kind.
Utopia itself, with its more complex understanding of how nations work and how writing
can make a difference in the life of nations, was translated into English in 1551 by Ralph
Robinson, a ‘citizen and Goldsmythe of London’, as he identifies himself, who had been
educated at Oxford. Robinson's translation is faulted by modern scholars for its
inaccuracies, but Robinson's prose is a good deal livelier than many subsequent efforts
and Robinson shows himself to be more than a little capable of appreciating what Utopia
had achieved. He calls the book A Fruteful and Plesaunt Worke of the Best State of a
Publique Weale, and of the New Yle called Utopia and in a preface extols it as much for its
style and wit as for its content. The translation was reprinted in 1555 and then five times
more through 1641. So even if few thinkers of the time would be openly as adventurous
as More in thinking about an ideal state, or in engaging in literary play, Utopia was
available to be read in both Latin and English, and perhaps widely read. In a preface to
the translation, Robinson goes to the effort of declaring that More's work belongs to a
great new tradition of English letters and that it is only a shame that in subsequent years
More refused to take sides with the Reformation, that he was ‘so much blinded, rather
with obstinacy than with ignorance, that could not or rather would not see the shining
light of God's holy truth …’6
So the sixteenth century was alive to the new way of thinking and writing that Utopia
represented, although it could also be apprehensive about it and the legend of the man
responsible for it, and it could imagine ways in which utopianism could be developed in
the pursuit of more economic parity and even the enforcement of stricter moral codes.
Then, as the sixteenth century came to a close, interest in utopian writing leaped
forward: engagement and disengagement were equally transformed by a new kind of
commitment to the utopian project. On the Continent, most notably, the Dominican monk
Tommaso Campanella wrote La Città del Sole (1602), which he later translated into Latin
and published as Civitas solis (1623); another Italian, political philosopher Lodovico
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Zùccolo published a dialogue called Il Belluzzi, o vero della città felice (1615) and another
called La Repubblica d’Evandria (1625); and the German Lutheran minister Johann
Valentin Andreae published Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (1619). All of
(p. 263) these works follow the genre of Utopia fairly closely, employing the device of a
philosophical dialogue where one of the interlocutors reports on travels to another land.
And all of them imagine a republic devoted to the common weal, Campanella in the
direction of an authoritarian, but mystical and communist state, Zùccolo in the direction
of republican-directed distributive justice, and Andreae in the direction of a
meritocratically governed and pious communist state.
Clearly, something was in the air in the early seventeenth century, something which More
had anticipated, but which was only just now becoming common currency for political
thinkers. In England would come the work of Francis Bacon and Robert Burton. Sir
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), one of the great minds of his age, had already written a work
from which Andreae had found inspiration, The Advancement of Learning (1605), where
Bacon called for a wholesale renewal of scientific research and education in England
along the lines of empiricism and collective, collegial enterprise. After his death was
published the incomplete text, The New Atlantis, where Bacon imagines a trip to yet
another hitherto unknown island of the Americas, a rational, pious, and generous society
devoted to learning. At about the same time, Robert Burton (1577–1640) was writing and
rewriting what is conventionally called ‘A Utopia of Mine Owne’, a section of the preface,
‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, to the mammoth Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–40).
Both Bacon and Burton embrace the Morean principle of literary play, though Bacon does
so in a very earnest, un-mocking spirit, while Burton does so humorously and sometimes
mischievously. But Bacon and Burton are also thinking quite carefully about the nature of
the kind of society they would like to live in. And in this they are akin to other early
seventeenth-century utopians. Campanella, Zùccolo, and Andreae were actively involved
in the political, religious, and scientific turmoil of their day, each in his own way
promoting progressive policies and programmes (the erratic Campanella ended up in jail
for most of his adult life as a reward for his efforts). Bacon, by contrast, was an
establishment figure, a Member of Parliament and eventually (like Thomas More before
him) the Chancellor of England; and Burton was a retiring Oxford don. But all five of
these figures are united in wanting to change the world, in wanting to make the world
run by more rational principles, in the pursuit of material and spiritual prosperity, more
or less collectively, and with a view towards promoting learning and the new science.
In contrast to the work of the previous century, these later utopian works are
characterized by the intensity of the commitment of their authors to the utopian project.
It is a two-sided commitment, to be sure. On the one hand, these utopias are urgent; the
writers want to think past what they take to be the contradictions and limitations of their
time; they want to imagine how things might be done. On the other hand, the utopias are
highly speculative. They are not weighed down by conventions of the present day, as most
of the utopias of the sixteenth century could be said to be. They all involve audacious
flights of hypothetical fancy. Neither New Atlantis nor ‘A Utopia of Mine Owne’ goes so far
as to embrace communism, it is true; the latter in fact openly renounces communism and
Page 11 of 16

other apparently impractical ideas in favour of proto-capitalist development and the

accumulation of capital. (In some ways, that makes ‘A Utopia of Mine (p. 264) Owne’ the
most modern of all these works.) But Bacon's and Burton's utopias are nevertheless
urgent efforts to rethink the bases of civil society, to repair what Burton thinks of as the
‘melancholy’ of modern social life, and what Bacon seems to imagine as its disappointing
inadequacy. And they are highly imaginative, openly removed from the pressures of the
here and now, from popular prejudice and received opinion. Bacon takes his readers to
the Island of Bensalem, off the coast of Peru, to view what it would be like, among other
things, to live in a society dedicated to acquiring the ‘light’ of scientific knowledge.
Burton keeps his readers at home, but he defies them to imagine a home country
transformed into a uniformly prosperous, vibrant, and happy whole.
Somewhat in the same spirit as the work of other utopists of the early seventeenth
century, but taking a new tack, comes one last major utopian text: Francis Godwin's The
Man in the Moone (1638). The Man in the Moone is presented not as a dialogue but
rather, like New Atlantis, as an adventure narrative. This time, however, the destination of
the adventurer is not to a better society, where human beings have learned how to
organize their lives for the good of the whole, but an otherworldly society, the society of
moon people, whose nature is different from that of humans. The tale was written at
about the same time as a somewhat similar text by the great astronomer, Johannes Kepler
(1571–1630), Somnium, published after the astronomer's death in 1634, where another
trip to the moon is imagined. But Godwin puts flesh and blood to his story, giving it the
tone and trappings of the picaresque novel, a form of writing which originated in the late
sixteenth century in Spain. The hero of Godwin's story is one Domingo Gonsales,
harnessing the power of high-flying geese, where the protagonist Domingo Gonsales
visits a paradisiacal society of giants. It is probably not an exaggeration to credit The Man
in the Moone (and not Kepler's Somnium) with being the first work of science fiction ever
written, putting into novelistic form a tale which considers the impact of scientific and
technological innovation in an imaginary time and place. The technology isn’t much; the
story is not very sophisticated, either from a scientific or a literary point of view; and the
paradisiacal world of the giants, though it answers to some of the commonplaces about
the classical Golden Age, doesn’t provide the reader, or even the protagonist of the story,
with much guidance. But technology, whether earthly or lunar, is the point of the story.
The point of the story, that is, is to underscore the promise of technology to compensate
humanity for its physical and moral insufficiencies. Unlike New Atlantis, The Man in the
Moone shows us not an ideal society that would be worth imitating if only we could, but a
world that we cannot imitate because of the limitations of our nature. It asks us instead to
look for other kinds of solutions to the problem of the state.
16.3 Engagement and disengagement
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One other text that is often mentioned with reference to early modern utopianism is
Mundus Alter et Idem (1595), written in Latin by English clergyman Joseph Hall, and
later loosely (but vividly) translated by John Healey for an edition of 1609, entitled, The
(p. 265) Discovery of a New World. Hall's work is a satirical text, more influenced by
Gargantua and Pantagruel, perhaps, than Utopia. In it one Mercurius Brittanicus (the
‘British messenger’) undertakes a voyage to Terra Australis Incognita, a region that the
fable locates in the regions of what we now call Antarctica. But what he discovers is no
model commonwealth. The Terra Australis is a world turned upside down, imagined as a
place where the faults and foibles of contemporary English society are ridiculously
exaggerated—alter et idem, different yet the same—the better to point out their inherent
absurdity. The book is an extremely negative work, a dystopia rather than a utopia, and so
far as it takes aim against the ambitions of free-spirited individuals of contemporary
England, holding them up to dystopian ridicule, it anticipates Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels (1721), not to mention satires closer to home such as Ben Jonson's comedy, The
Alchemist (1611).
Whether Mundus alter et idem should be counted as a ‘utopian’ text is debatable. Its
negativity would seem to count against it. So too would be the fact that unlike, say,
Francis Godwin's Domingo Gonsales, Mercurius Brittanicus has nothing to offer his
readers except his story. He learns nothing in his travels; he finds nothing in the ‘other
world’ to admire. But Mundus alter et idem would seem then, at the very least, to have
something to tell us about the nature of utopian engagement. For in it we see what
happens when, for all of the literary power inherent to imaginary voyage, and for all the
fun a writer and his readers may have with it, the utopian imagination has nothing to
offer but criticism of the present. In it we see what happens, in other words, when the
utopian imagination leaves us with nothing either to wish for or hope after.
The production of any utopian fiction would seem to require a measure of disengagement.
Fictionality seems to demand it. Utopian fiction is inherently ironic precisely because it is
fictional. It is inherently about something that is not, and very likely cannot be. But when
that disengagement is carried to an extreme, when it is not also coupled with
engagement, though the fiction itself may prosper, the text as a whole may well be, in a
word, un-giving. More's Utopia may be inherently unstable, but it clearly has something
to give its readers. So it was in the case of most of More's prominent imitators in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Thomas Elyot to Francis Godwin. Even
Rabelais's silliness (which Rabelais would suggest is actually not so silly) has something
to offer. But Mundus alter et idem gives us nothing, even if we are willing to be receptive
to it. On the other side of its cynicism about the world as it is lies a kind of complacency
about the world as it is.
What the counter-example of Mundus alter et idem may call our attention to, therefore, is
that, if it is to work as utopian writing, a utopian fiction will have to couple its
disengagement with engagement. But what, then, is the nature of this engagement?
Speaking only of work from 1516 to 1640, one is tempted to say that what the writing is
engaged with—both in the way it is written and in what, however ironically, it advocates—
Page 13 of 16

is what we now call ‘modernity’. Utopia is a ‘new island’ and all the major utopian works
of the period attempt to engage with that which is new. This is not newness for its own
sake. It is newness for the sake of the betterment of the human condition.
Shortly after the period under consideration, and indeed already percolating in
(p. 266)
England and the rest of Europe during the 1630s, would come a veritable explosion of
utopian writing, with results as varied as the industry-minded Macaria by Gabriel Plattes
(1641), the radical communist state imagined in The Law of Freedom in a Platform by
Gerrard Winstanley (1652), and the constitutionalist Oceana by James Harrington (1656).
In these works the commitment already noticeable in early seventeenth-century utopias is
redoubled; it becomes so intense that the boundary between fiction and reality becomes
blurred and the ironies of utopian writing come to serve the realities of the utopian
project, rather than the other way around.
But how we are to view this transition from the work of people like Bacon and Burton to
the work of people like Plattes and Winstanley depends in large part on how we view the
development of intellectual history generally. It depends on whether we allow ourselves
to see anything like progress in it. It depends as well on how we feel about the project of
modernity. And it depends, finally, on whether, as we review the documents and political
projects of the past, we allow ourselves to find anything we may still wish for or hope
after.
Further Reading
Appelbaum, Robert. Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth Century England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice. and Paul
Knight, 3 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
——— The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2000).
Boesky, Amy. Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England (Athens, GA: University
of Georgia Press, 1996).
Davis, J. C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Greenblatt, Stephen C. Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
Page 14 of 16

Hexter, J. H. More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1952).
Holstun, James. A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England

and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Knapp, Jeffrey. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from ‘Utopia’ to
‘The Tempest’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Manuel, Frank, and Fritzie Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap, 1979).
Marin, Louis. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A. Vollrath
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984).
Skinner, Quentin. ‘Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the Language of Renaissance
(p. 267)
Humanism’, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 123–57.
Sylvester, R. S., and G. P. Marc’hadour, eds. Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Thomas
More (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977).
Notes:
(1) Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (1556), in Three Early Modern Utopias,
ed. Susan Bruce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123.
(2) Acts 4:34–5, KJV.
(3) There is a ‘Fifth Book’, but many scholars, including this one, doubt that much, if any,
of it was written by Rabelais.
(4) Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse on the Commonwealth of

England, ed. L. Alston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906), 142.
(5) Thomas Lupton, Siuqila, Too Good To Be True (London, 1580), 38.
(6) Utopia, trans. Robinson, 146.
Robert Appelbaum
Robert Appelbaum received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and
is currently Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. His
publications include Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England
(Cambridge University Press, 2002), Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup and Other
Page 15 of 16

Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture and Food Among the Early Moderns
(University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Dishing It Out: In Search of the Restaurant
Experience (Reaktion, 2011). A Leverhulme and AHRC Fellow, his most recent
research focuses on terrorism and the literary imagination.
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Utopia and Utopianism

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Jun 2013

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: Utopian tradition, English prose, utopian project, utopianism, engagement

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 06 August 2018

Discussions of utopia and utopianism are inescapably complicated by this multiplicity of

Total engagement in a project of utopianism, for which More's Utopia is a foundational

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16.1 Influences, intertexualities, and meaning

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gets caught up in the same back-and-forth of jocoseriousness as the book itself

(p. 259) 16.2 Subsequent developments

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Still more motivated by economic considerations was a second humanist dialogue,

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constitution, Smith concludes by renouncing the ‘vaine imaginations, phantasies of

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behaviour, from no drunkenness or gluttony or irreverence or fornication. No one suffers

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other apparently impractical ideas in favour of proto-capitalist development and the

16.3 Engagement and disengagement

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Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 06 August 2018

Greenblatt, Stephen C. Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago:

Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 06 August 2018

Hexter, J. H. More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University

Holstun, James. A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England

(2) Acts 4:34–5, KJV.

(4) Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse on the Commonwealth of

(6) Utopia, trans. Robinson, 146.

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Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 06 August 2018

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