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utopia

  (yū-tō'pē-ə) pronunciation
Utopia

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n.
    1. often Utopia An ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects.
    2. A work of fiction describing a utopia.
  1. An impractical, idealistic scheme for social and political reform.

[New Latin Ūtopia, imaginary island in Utopia by Sir Thomas More : Greek ou, not, no + Greek topos, place.]


 
 
Antonyms: utopia

n

Definition: ideal place and life
Antonyms: hell


 

Utopia Politico-philosophic work by Thomas More (1516), initiating a literary genre. Steeped in literary humanism, More sought for the best form of government through discussions with the fictitious Raphael Hythloday. This is followed by Hythloday's account of the ‘New Island of Utopia’ (‘Noplace’), but its egalitarian commonwealth appears flawed since, despite religious freedom and absence of hunger and homelessness, personal freedom is restricted.

 

The model for descriptions of the ideal state has always been Plato's Republic, but for the fictional version, the report of a far-off country, perfectly organized and happy, the pioneer was More (Utopia, 1516). He was inspired (like many imitators throughout Europe) by the first tales of exploration. In France (neglecting an isolated effort in 1616, the anonymous Huguenot Royaume d'Antangil), a tradition of Utopian fiction developed during the early Enlightenment.

The pattern was fixed in the 1670s by the inventions of Foigny and Veiras, both set in the as-yet unexplored southern continent. Tyssot de Patot's ‘Austral Land’ resembles Veiras's, as does the Saharan society found in the anonymous Mémoires de Gaudence de Lucques (1746). Other minor works (those by Gilbert, Lesconvel, and Lassay deserve mention) vary the geography and other details, but not the assumption that reason can satisfy human nature by devising a prosperous society, carefully regulated, having social and sexual equality (within limits), and free from European miseries such as war.

More influential were works not strictly speaking Utopian, but containing Utopian episodes, above all Fénelon's Télémaque, imitated by his disciple Ramsay (Voyages de Cyrus) and by Terrasson (Séthos). Montesquieu's regenerated Troglodytes, in the Lettres persanes, and perhaps even the Eldoradans of Candide, are also Fénelonian. The critical potential of Utopia was also exploited: vigorously in La Hontan's idealized, anti-European Native American society, more mildly in Marivaux's stage Utopia L' Île des esclaves, and with humour, as regards religion and sex, in Diderot's Tahiti ( Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville).

After 1750, as freedom of publication increased, political idealism was expressed more overtly, in treatises rather than fiction. Morelly's Utopian epic, La Basiliade, was followed by his Code de la nature, legislating for a propertyless society. Both Rousseau's Contrat social and (more justifiably) the domestic, rural society of Clarens in La Nouvelle Héloïse, can be considered Utopian. Mercier's L'An 2440 broke new ground by putting an improved Paris into the future; it contains much direct criticism of the present, as does Restif's L'An 2000. During the Revolution, the real re-creation of society swamped the Utopian variety. The next 50 years saw the expression of what Marx disdainfully called ‘Utopian socialism’ in Saint-Simon and Fourier; Cabet expressed it traditionally, with sentimental trappings, in his Voyage en Icarie.

[Christopher Betts]

Bibliography

  • R. Trousson, Voyages aux pays de nulle part (1975)
 
(yūtō'pēə) [Gr.,=no place], title of a book by Sir Thomas More, published in Latin in 1516. The work pictures an ideal state where all is ordered for the best for humanity as a whole and where the evils of society, such as poverty and misery, have been eliminated. The popularity of the book has given the generic name Utopia to all concepts of ideal states. The description of a utopia enables an author not only to set down criticisms of evils in the contemporary social scene but also to outline vast and revolutionary reforms without the necessity of describing how they will be effected. Thus, the influence of utopian writings has generally been inspirational rather than practical.

The Utopian Ideal over Time

The name utopia is applied retroactively to various ideal states described before More's work, most notably to that of the Republic of Plato. St. Augustine's City of God in the 5th cent. enunciated the theocratic ideal that dominated visionary thinking in the Middle Ages. With the Renaissance the ideal of a utopia became more worldly, but the religious element in utopian thinking is often present thereafter, such as in the politico-religious ideals of 17th-century English social philosophers and political experimenters. Among the famous pre-19th-century utopian writings are François Rabelais's description of the Abbey of Thélème in Gargantua (1532), The City of the Sun (1623) by Tommaso Campanella, The New Atlantis (1627) of Francis Bacon, and the Oceana (1656) of James Harrington.

In the 18th-century Enlightenment, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others gave impetus to the belief that an ideal society—a Golden Age—had existed in the primitive days of European society before the development of civilization corrupted it. This faith in natural order and the innate goodness of humanity had a strong influence on the growth of visionary or utopian socialism. The end in view of these thinkers was usually an idealistic communism based on economic self-sufficiency or on the interaction of ideal communities. Saint-Simon, Étienne Cabet, Charles Fourier, and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in France and Robert Owen in England are typical examples of this sort of thinker. Actual experiments in utopian social living were tried in Europe and the United States, but for the most part the efforts were neither long-lived nor more than partially successful.

The humanitarian socialists were largely displaced after the middle of the 19th cent. by political and economic theorists, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who preached the achievement of the ideal state through political and revolutionary action. The utopian romance, however, became an extremely popular literary form. These novels depicted the glowing, and sometimes frightening, prospects of the new industrialism and social change. One of the most important of these works was Looking Backward (1888), by Edward Bellamy, who had a profound influence on economic idealism in America. In England, Erewhon (1872), by Samuel Butler, News from Nowhere (1891), by William Morris, and A Modern Utopia (1905), by H. G. Wells, were notable examples of the genre; in Austria an example was Theodor Hertzka's Freiland (1890). The 20th cent. saw a veritable flood of these literary utopias, most of them “scientific utopias” in which humans enjoy a blissful leisure while all or most of the work is done for them by docile machines.

Connected with the literary fable of a utopia has been the belief in an actual ideal state in some remote and undiscovered corner of the world. The mythical Atlantis, described by Plato, was long sought by Greek and later mariners. Similar to this search were the vain expeditions in search of the Isles of the Blest, or Fortunate Isles, and El Dorado.

Satirical and Other Utopias

The adjective utopian has come into some disrepute and is frequently used contemptuously to mean impractical or impossibly visionary. The device of describing a utopia in satire or for the exercise of wit is almost as old as the serious utopia. The satiric device goes back to such comic utopias as that of Aristophanes in The Birds. Bernard Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees (1714) and Jonathan Swift in parts of Gulliver's Travels (1726) are in the same tradition. Pseudo-utopian satire has been extensive in modern times in such novels as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). The rise of the modern totalitarian state has brought forth several works, notably Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), by George Orwell, which describe the unhappy fate of the individual under the control of a supposedly benevolent despotism.

Bibliography

See V. L. Parrington, American Dreams (2d ed. 1964); L. Mumford, The Story of the Utopias (rev. ed. 1966); M. Holloway, Heavens on Earth (2d ed. 1966); G. Negley and J. M. Patrick, The Quest for Utopia (1952, repr. 1971); E. Rothstein, H. Muschamp, and M. E. Marty, Visions of Utopia (2003).


 

The impulse to wonder about a more perfect world is at least as old as Gilgamesh's search for the garden of Dilmun (c. 2500 B.C.E.). The dream of an earthly paradise seems to be widespread among the peoples of the earth, as a way of both imagining the ideal and expressing dissatisfaction with the here and now. Gilgamesh's perilous journey is prompted by his shock at the loss of his boon companion Enkidu and his own looming mortality. The propensity for utopian speculation is in part nostalgia for an idealized human existence, believed in the Islamic and Judeo-Christian tradition to have once existed in a paradise now lost. In times of social and political upheaval, such as existed in early modern Europe, authors also used the ideal for satiric purposes. As a result, utopian literature has flourished as a genre.

The first and most significant work of this kind is Sir Thomas More'sUtopia, published in Latin at Louvain in 1516 (1551 in the first English translation). In letters to friends, More called his planned work "Nusquama," from the Latin adverb for 'nowhere'; however, when he chose the title, he transliterated the Greek negative ou into the Latin u and combined it with the Greek topos to create a new word, "utopia," or 'nowhere'. In the commendatory letters from his humanist circle printed with early editions of the work, several observed that this country also ought to be called "Eutopia" (from the Greek eu for 'good'). Thus "utopian" was seen at once as an intriguing but impossible ideal.

More (1478–1535), who served Henry VIII as an adviser and became chancellor in 1529, wrote his classic in the turbulent years just before the beginning of the Reformation. He cast his imaginative flight in the form of a dialogue, a rhetorical strategy that allowed him to express dissatisfaction with current social conditions while maintaining a comfortable distance rhetorically from such dangerous ideas as the abolition of private property. The first part is a discussion between Raphael Hythloday ('babbler of nonsense'), a mariner who had chanced upon a fabulous land where all goods were held in common, and More himself, about the problems of Christian Europe, which was plagued by greed and corruption. Part two (which was written first) is the actual discussion of the ideal society, where Christianity takes root among the Utopians with surprising ease because it is so consistent with the Utopians' communal way of life. At the end, the character More finally admits that he would like to see some aspects of Utopian society put into practice in England, but states that he believes it is unlikely ever to happen. Ultimately, Utopia attempts to negotiate a course between the ideal and the actual and implicitly recognizes that, given the fallibility of mankind, perfection is impossible.

In the aftermath of Utopia, which earned great renown for More, other descriptive works appeared that made use of some of the same literary devices: a shipwreck or other chance encounter with an ideal community, followed by a return to Europe. Ortensio Lando and Anton Francesco Doni's collaborativeEutopia in 1548 (its full title is The Newly Discovered Republic of the Government of the Isle of Eutopia) reverses this scenario by having a Eutopian citizen visit Italy to comment directly upon its excesses, which sparked interest in other utopian imitations.

Christian Utopias of the Seventeenth Century

In the seventeenth century Francis Bacon's (1561–1626) advocacy of a "new" science based on inductive reasoning led others to dream of synthesizing human knowledge with religion to produce a universal knowledge, or "pansophia." This "utopian" myth became the driving force for a new vision of a Christian commonwealth. Bacon's utopian work, The New Atlantis (written c. 1614 and published posthumously in 1627) was a coda to The Great Instauration (1620). It took the form of a voyage to the island of Bensalem, the centerpiece of which is Salomon's House, a research college where the new scientific method leads to discoveries and inventions that greatly enrich the commonwealth. A belief in pansophia had similarly inspired Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) to put forth his vision of The City of the Sun (1623), a sea captain's account of an ideal Christian community, where a single ruler named Sun is assisted by three aides, Power, Knowledge, and Love (with an obvious indebtedness to the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). The role of science is paramount, with the seven concentric walls that ring the city displaying pictorially the unity of all knowledge. By naming these walls for the seven planets orbiting the sun, Campanella clearly stands with Copernicus on the most important scientific debate of the age.

The vision of a Christian commonwealth founded on scientific principles is at the heart of one of the century's more influential utopianists, Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), a Lutheran churchman who produced several works, notably Christianopolis (1619, published as Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio [Description of a Christian republic]), which garnered praise from learned readers such as Robert Burton. Framed as a traveler's tale, it describes a Christian city in which an elite brotherhood possesses a secret wisdom and oversees the further exploration of nature's secrets through scientific experimentation. Andreae had been part of a youthful circle at the University of Tübingen that had produced a series of utopian pamphlets around 1610 (Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio Fraternitatis [The Fame of the Fraternity and the Confession of the Fraternity]), advocating a Protestant brotherhood to bring about reform within the Lutheran church. These pamphlets caused an extraordinary sensation when published in print, often called the Rosicrucian furor. Andreae's ideas greatly influenced the Moravian reformer Jan Comenius (c. 1592–1670) and passed into England through Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662), who brought out an English translation of another treatise by Andreae (A Modell of a Christian Society [London, 1647]) to help reform England in the aftermath of the Civil War. With some justification, the Royal Society (founded in 1660) can be considered the fruition of the dream of a Baconian research college to aid the commonwealth.

Utopian Thought Among the Philosophes

The rationalists of the Enlightenment who helped prepare the way for the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 did not produce any recognized utopian classics. There were, however, utopian elements in variousworks, suchas Fénelon's Adventures of Telemachus (1699), Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721), the sketch of El Dorado in Voltaire's Candide (1759), and Condorcet's Esquisse (1794), that were influential at the time.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Andreae, Johann Valentin. Christianopolis. Introduced and translated by Edward H. Thompson. International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol. 162. Dordrecht and London, 1999.

Bacon, Sir Francis. The New Atlantis and the Great Instauration. Edited by Jerry Weinberger. Arlington Heights, Ill., 1989.

Campanella, Tommaso. The City of the Sun. Translated by Daniel J. Donno. Berkeley, 1981.

More, Thomas. Utopia. Translated by Edward Surtz. New Haven, 1964.

Secondary Sources

Dickson, Donald R. The Tessera of Antilia: Utopian Brotherhoods & Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 88. Leiden, New York, and Cologne, 1998.

Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

Negley, Glenn. Utopian Literature: A Bibliography with a Supplementary Listing of Works Influential in Utopian Thought. Lawrence, Kans., 1977.

—DONALD R. DICKSON

 
Quotes About: Utopia

Quotes:

"Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?" - William Golding

"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian." - Emma Goldman

"I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin." - Gunther Grass

"We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian." - Lionel Trilling

 
Wikipedia: utopia
Left panel (The Earthly Paradise, Garden of Eden), from Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.
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Left panel (The Earthly Paradise, Garden of Eden), from Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Utopia (from Greek: οὐ no, and τόπος, place, i.e. "no place" or "place that does not exist," as well as "perfect place") is a fictional island near the coast of the Atlantic Ocean written about by Sir Thomas More as the fictional character Raphael Hythloday (translated from the Greek as "knowing in trifles") recounts his experiences in his travels to the deliciously fictional island with a perfect social, legal, and political system. The name has come to mean, in popular parlance, an ideal society. As such, it has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempted to create an ideal society, and fictional societies portrayed in literature. The term is sometimes used pejoratively, in reference to an unrealistic ideal that is impossible to realize, and has spawned other concepts, most prominently "dystopia".

Related terms

The band Eutopia based in London UK and named for this perfect place, play melodic rock which can be found at www.myspace.com/eutopia.

  • Outopia derived from the Greek 'ou' for "no" and '-topos' for "place," a fictional, non-realistic place. This is the other half from Eutopia, and the two together juxtapose to Utopia.
  • Heterotopia, the "other place", with its real and imagined possibilities (a mix of "utopian" escapism and turning virtual possibilities into reality) — example: cyberspace. Samuel R. Delany's novel Trouble on Triton is subtitled An Ambiguous Heterotopia to highlight that it is not strictly utopian (though not dystopian). The novel offers several conflicting perspectives on the concept of utopia.

More's Utopia is largely based on Plato's Republic. It is a perfect version of Republic wherein the beauties of society reign (eg: equalism and a general pacifist attitude), although its citizens are all ready to fight if need be. The evils of society, eg: poverty and misery, are all removed. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war, but hires mercenaries from among its war-prone neighbors (these mercenaries were deliberately sent into dangerous situations in the hope that the more warlike populations of all surrounding countries will be weeded out, leaving peaceful peoples). The society encourages tolerance of all religions. Some readers have chosen to accept this imaginary society as the realistic blueprint for a working nation, while others have postulated More intended nothing of the sort. Some maintain the position that More's Utopia functions only on the level of a satire, a work intended to reveal more about the England of his time than about an idealistic society. This interpretation is bolstered by the title of the book and nation, and its apparent equivocation between the Greek for "no place" and "good place": "Utopia" is a compound of the syllable ou-, meaning "no", and topos, meaning place. But the homonymous prefix eu-, meaning "good," also resonates in the word, with the implication that the perfectly "good place" is really "no place."

Types of Utopia

Economic Utopia

These utopias are based on economics. Most intentional communities attempting to create an economic utopia were formed in response to the harsh economic conditions of the 19th century.

Particularly in the early nineteenth century, several utopian ideas arose, often in response to the social disruption created by the development of commercialism and capitalism. These are often grouped in a greater "utopian socialist" movement, due to their shared characteristics: an egalitarian distribution of goods, frequently with the total abolition of money, and citizens only doing work which they enjoy and which is for the common good, leaving them with ample time for the cultivation of the arts and sciences. One classic example of such a utopia was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Another socialist utopia is William Morris' News from Nowhere, written partially in response to the top-down (bureaucratic) nature of Bellamy's utopia, which Morris criticized. However, as the socialist movement developed it moved away from utopianism; Marx in particular became a harsh critic of earlier socialisms he described as utopian. (For more information see the History of Socialism article.)

Utopias have also been imagined by the opposite side of the political spectrum. For example, Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress portrays an individualistic and libertarian utopia. Capitalist utopias of this sort are generally based on perfect market economies, in which there is no market failure—or the issue of market failure is never addressed, any more than socialist utopias address the issue of planning failures. Also consider Eric Frank Russell's book The Great Explosion (1963) whose last section details an economic and social utopia. This forms the first mention of the idea of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS).

A blend of socialism and capitalism is seen by few as the type of economy in a utopia. It talks about the idea of small community owned enterprises working under the capitalist model of economy.

Political and historical utopia

Political utopias are ones in which the government establishes a society that is striving toward perfection. Many such governments tend to be harsh in their execution of laws and allow little individualism if it conflicts with their primary goals. Many strive for a controlled society where the state or government replaces religious and family values (and loyalties for that matter).

A global utopia of world peace is often seen as one of the possible inevitable endings of history.

Sparta was a militaristic utopia founded by Lycurgus (though some, especially Athenians, may have considered it a dystopia). It was a Greek power until its defeat by the Thebans at the battle of Leuctra.

Religious utopia

New Harmony, a utopian attempt; depicted as proposed by Robert Owen
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New Harmony, a utopian attempt; depicted as proposed by Robert Owen

These utopias are based on religious ideals, and are to date those most commonly found in human society. Their members are usually required to follow and believe in the particular religious tradition that established the utopia. Some permit non-believers or non-adherents to take up residence within them; others (such as the Community at Qumran) do not.

The Jewish, Christian and Islamic ideas of the Garden of Eden and Heaven may be interpreted as forms of utopianism, especially in their folk-religious forms. Such religious "utopias" are often described as "gardens of delight", implying an existence free from worry in a state of bliss or enlightenment. They postulate existences free from sin, pain, poverty and death, and often assume communion with beings such as angels or the houri. In a similar sense the Hindu concept of Moksha and the Buddhist concept of Nirvana may be thought of as a kind of utopia.

However, the usual idea of Utopia, which is normally created by human effort, is more clearly evident in the use of these ideas as the bases for religious utopias, as members attempt to establish/reestablish on Earth a society which reflects the virtues and values they believe have been lost or which await them in the Afterlife.

In the United States and Europe during the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century and thereafter, many radical religious groups formed utopian societies. They sought to form communities where all aspects of people's lives could be governed by their faith. Among the best-known of these utopian societies was the Shaker movement, which originated in England in the 18th century but moved to America shortly after its founding. Other good examples are Fountain Grove, Riker's Holy City and 15 other Californian utopian colonies between 1855 and 1955 (Hine), as well as SointulaPDF (198 KiB) in B.C., Canada and 15 other socialist and religious communities round the world, including Finnish "kolkhozes"in the largest utopian society ever, the Soviet Union (Peltoniemi).


See also: End of the world (religion), Eschatology, Millennialism, and Utopianism

Scientific and technological utopia

See also: hedonistic imperative, transhumanism, technological singularity, abolitionist society, techno-utopia, and Technocracy movement

These are set in the future, when it is believed that advanced science and technology will allow utopian living standards; for example, the absence of death and suffering; changes in human nature and the human condition. These utopian societies tend to change what "human" is all about. Technology has affected the way humans have lived to such an extent that normal functions, like sleep, eating or even reproduction, has been replaced by an artificial means. Other kinds of this utopia envisioned, include a society where humans have struck a balance with technology and it is merely used to enhance the human living condition (e.g. Star Trek). In place of the static perfection of a utopia, libertarian transhumanists envision an "extropia", an open, evolving society allowing individuals and voluntary groupings to form the institutions and social forms they prefer.

Garrett Jones published "Ourtopia" in 2004, arguing that, instead of a 'no place' we need to use all the resources at our command to make 'our place' proof against climate change and obsolete tribalisms. Buckminster Fuller presented a theoretical basis for technological utopianism and set out to develop a variety of technologies ranging from maps to designs for cars and houses which might lead to the development of such a utopia.

One notable example of a technological and libertarian socialist utopia is Scottish author Iain M. Bank's Culture.

A variation on this theme was found earlier in the theories of Eugenics. Believing that many traits were hereditary in nature, the eugenists believed that not only healthier, more intelligent race could be bred, but many other traits could be selected for, including "talent", or against, including drunkness and criminality. This called for "positive eugenics" encouraging those with good genes to have children, and "negative eugenics" discouraging those with bad genes, or preventing them altogether by confinement or forcible sterilization.

Opposing this optimism is the prediction that advanced science and technology will, through deliberate misuse or accident, cause environmental damage or even humanity's extinction. Critics advocate precautions against the premature embrace of new technologies.

Utopianism

Utopianism refers to the various social and political movements, and a significant body of upheld.

In many cultures, societies, religions, and cosmogonies, there is some myth or memory of a distant past when humankind lived in a primitive and simple state, but at the same time one of perfect happiness and fulfillment. In those days, the various myths tell us, there was an instinctive harmony between man and nature. Men's needs were few and their desires limited. Both were easily satisfied by the abundance provided by nature. Accordingly, there were no motives whatsoever for war or oppression. Nor was there any need for hard and painful work. Humans were simple and pious, and felt themselves close to the gods.

These mythical or religious archetypes are inscribed in all the cultures and resurge with special vitality when people are in difficult and critical times. However, the projection of the myth does not take place towards the remote past, but either towards the future or towards distant and fictional places (for example, The Land of Cockaygne, a straightforward parody of a paradise), imagining that at some time of the future, at some point of the space or beyond the death must exist the possibility of living happily.

These myths of the earliest stage of humankind have been referred to by various names, as the following examples will demonstrate:

Golden Age

The Golden Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder.
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The Golden Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

The Greek poet Hesiod, around the 8th century BC, in his compilation of the mythological tradition (the poem Works and Days), explained that, prior to the present era, there were other four progressively most perfect ones, the oldest of which was called the Golden age.

Also Plutarch, the Greek historian and biographer of the 1st century, dealt with the blissful and mythic past of the humanity.

Arcadia Arcadia, e g in Sir Philip Sidney's prose romance The Old Arcadia (1580). Originally a region in the Peloponnesus, Arcadia became a synonym for any rural area that serves as a pastoral setting, as a locus amoenus ("delightful place"):

The Biblical Garden of Eden

The Biblical Garden of Eden as depicted in Genesis 2 (Authorized Version of 1611):

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. [...]
And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. [...]
And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; [...] And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

The Land of Cokaygne

The Land of Cokaygne [also spelled Cockaygne or Cockaigne] (in the German tradition referred to as "Schlaraffenland"[1]) has been aptly called the "poor man's heaven", being a popular fantasy of pure hedonism and thus a foil for the innocent and instinctively virtuous life that is depicted in all the other accounts mentioned above. Cockaygne is a land of extravagance and excess rather than simplicity and piety. There is freedom from work, and every material thing is free and available. Cooked larks fly straight into one's mouth; the rivers run with wine; sexual promiscuity is the norm; and there is a fountain of youth which keeps everyone young and active.

There is a medieval poem (c. 1315) written in rhyming couplets which is entitled "The Land of Cokaygne":

Far in the sea, to the west of Spain,
Is a country called Cokaygne.
There's no land not anywhere,
In goods or riches to compare.
Though Paradise be merry and bright
Cokaygne is of far fairer sight....

New World Order Utopia

Or just Utopia is a movement newly formed in America in 2007 led by 9th Life Enlightened Buddha Daniel Christoph. It follows a 10 step idealogy to be used as a guideline to drafting a New World Order Law. The guidelines are as follows:

1. We must do away with all form of monetary funds; we are just supplying a service.

2. We must do away with competition. Company A and Company B are making the same thing. There is simply no point.

3. The issue of a practical energy source. We need to develop other sources of energy in lieu of eventually getting of this planet.

4. We should initially refurbish housing of all to pleasing and acceptable standards then for every family unit to inhabit equitable residences.

5. We develop a free universal health care system.

6. The issue of the penal system. Prisons need to be less cruel and inhumane.

7. Education is free.

8. Our world governments shall dissolve under the above system concentrating a great extent on space exploration in lieu of the fact that Earth will not last forever.

9. The above steps will allow for an alleviated workload on ourselves meaning our times of labor will be cut in half if we wish.

10. Lastly not least, the above will allow us for more time to create a world of art.


Finding utopia

All these myths also express some hope that the idyllic state of affairs they describe is not irretrievably and irrevocably lost to mankind, that it can be regained in some way or other.

One way would be to look for the earthly paradise -- for a place like Shangri-La, hidden in the Tibetan mountains and described by James Hilton in his Utopian novel Lost Horizon (1933). Such paradise on earth must be somewhere if only man were able to find it. Christopher Columbus followed directly in this tradition in his belief that he had found the Garden of Eden when, towards the end of the 15th century, he first encountered the New World and its peoples.

Another way of regaining the lost paradise (or Paradise Lost, as 17th century English poet John Milton calls it) would be to wait for the future, for the return of the Golden Age. According to Christian theology, man's Fall from Paradise, caused by man alone when he disobeyed God ("but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it"), has resulted in the wickedness of character that all human beings have been born with since ("Original Sin") such as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four became the primary method of Utopian expression and rejection. (Kumar 1987)

Still, post-war era also found some Utopianist fiction for some future harmonic state of humanity (e.g. Demolition Man (film)).

In a scientific approach to finding utopia, The Global scenario group, an international group of scientists founded by Paul Raskin, used scenario analysis and backcasting to map out a path to an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable future. Its findings suggest that a global citizens movement is necessary to steer political, economic, and corporate entities toward this new sustainability paradigm.

Examples of utopia

See also utopian and dystopian fiction

Related terms and concepts

References

  • Kumar, Krishan (1991) Utopianism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press) ISBN 0-335-15361-5
  • Manuel, Frank & Manuel, Fritzie (1979) Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Blackwell) ISBN 0-674-93185-8
  • Hine, Robert V. (1983) California's Utopian Colonies (University of California Press) ISBN 0-520-04885-7
  • Kumar, K (1987) Utopia and Anti-utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell) ISBN 0-631-16714-5

External links


 
Translations: Translations for: Utopia

Dansk (Danish)
n. - utopia

Nederlands (Dutch)
utopie (droombeeld), Utopia (denkbeeldige staat)

Français (French)
n. - utopie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Utopie, Utopia

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ουτοπία

Italiano (Italian)
utopia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - utopia (f)

Русский (Russian)
утопия

Español (Spanish)
n. - utopía

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - Utopia, utopi

中文(简体) (Chinese (Simplified))
乌托邦, 理想国, 理想的完美境界

中文(繁體) (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 烏托邦, 理想國, 理想的完美境界

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 유토피아, 이상향

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - ユートピア, 理想郷, 理想郷のあった島

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) المجتمع الامثل, وضع ايجابي خيالي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮חברה אידיאלית, אוטופיה, מקום/מצב עניינים מושלם דמיוני‬


 
 

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