Utopian fiction and Utopian Programs
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Utopian fiction and utopian programs have been written for centuries, and it seems likely that there is something in the human soul that seeks the perfect society. There are two reasons for this--a perfect society would fulfill the promise of humankind on earth rather than humanity having to wait for the City of God in heaven, and the society in which human beings do live is seen as seriously flawed. The question to be answered is: To what extent do utopias reflect cultural obsessions? It is not clear that they reflect cultural obsessions, since the use of the word "obsessions" indicates a certain pathology, an excessive concern, but clearly utopias do reflect a deep-felt need to correct the inequities of this world and to produce a social system that serves human culture in a better, more productive, more fair, and more lasting way than any society has managed to do to date. Men like Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes believed that human beings came together in society as a social contract, trading the freedom of nature for the security that could be achieved in a social setting. This implies a desire for balance between freedom and security, and the attention given to utopian schemes shows that many thoughtful people believe that society as constituted maintains an imbalance to be corrected if possible. At the same time, the one cultural obsession that is clearly evident in the impetus toward utopianism is the belief in progress as an inevitable force in human existence, a
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in More's time--the life of the farmer in Utopia is not dissimilar to that of the British farmer except for the communal living in Utopia, for instance. The family is the basic unit of society in Utopia, reflecting More's own belief in the primacy of the family and his perception that family life was not sufficiently strong in his own society.
Plato had offered his version of a utopian society in The Republic, and he also developed a society reflecting his political beliefs and shaping everything from the family unit to the larger governmental body, all reflecting an ideal to which Plato believed the human species was developing. For Plato, of course, what he saw as an ideal he believed existed in another realm so that the imperfect reflections in this world were only shadows of that ideal, while More and other utopians generally see their schemes as something to be sought and not as an ideal of which we are only an approximation. Plato describes a society that is completely rational. The ideal state projected by Plato is based on his concept of the good life, and it has been developed in a way that would protect that sort of life within the context of a civil state. In the dialogue of The Republic, Plato seeks to set forth
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Approximate Word count = 3491
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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