11 - Utopianism

Summary

Christian social morality and the best state

In the fifty years after its first publication in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia appeared in ten further Latin editions and in French, Dutch, English, German, and Italian translations. Widespread and profound as its influence was, its ambivalance generated both utopian and anti-utopian imitators. In other words, the spread of More's fictional device – the ‘discovery’ of an ideal society – was not always utopian in its political thought and the utopian impulse proper was not necessarily derived in the profoundest sense from the imitation of a model.

The fifteenth-century rediscovery of Plato and Plutarch stimulated the early modern ‘best state’ exercise and encouraged a debate on constitutions which replicated the seed-bed out of which the classical utopia had sprung (Logan 1983; Ferguson 1975, p. 28; Manuel and Manuel 1979, pp. 95–100). But some aspects of civic humanism and of Reformation thought endorsed and broadened the idea of social redemption through individual moral performance, typified for the late middle ages by the Mirror of Princes tradition (Skinner 1978, 1, pp. 126–35). Still others gradually excited a vast outpouring of millennial expectation, especially on the Protestant side of the Reformation divide. These two traditions of discourse about social idealisation – by individual moral effort or by a millennial and literal coup de grace – were quantitatively much more important in early modern Europe than the reemergent utopian mode which existed in dialogue with them. It is helpful, therefore, to distingish utopianism as a form of social idealisation.