A utopia ( ) is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its residents. The term was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, which describes a fictional island society in the New World, but some utopian visions predate it.
Hypothetical utopias and existing intentional communities that have utopian elements focus on, among other things, equality in the areas of economics, government and justice, with the method and structure of proposed implementation varying according to ideology. Lyman Tower Sargent argues that the nature of a utopia is inherently contradictory because societies are not homogeneous. Their members have desires that conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied. To quote: The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia. Utopian and dystopian fiction has become a popular literary category. Despite being common parlance for something imaginary, utopianism inspired and was inspired by some reality-based fields and concepts such as architecture, file sharing, social networks, universal basic income, communes, open borders, and even pirate bases.
Etymology and history The word utopia was coined in 1516 from Ancient Greek by the Englishman Sir Thomas More for his Latin text Utopia. It literally translates as "no place", coming from the ("not") and τόπος ("place"), and meant any non-existent society, when 'described in considerable detail'. However, in standard usage, the word's meaning has shifted and now usually describes a non-existent society that is intended to be viewed as considerably better than contemporary society.
In his original work, More carefully pointed out the similarity of the word to eutopia, meaning "good place", from ("good" or "well") and τόπος ("place"), which ostensibly would be the more appropriate term for the concept in modern English. The pronunciations of eutopia and utopia in English are identical, which may have given rise to the change in meaning. Dystopia, a term meaning "bad place" coined in 1868, draws on this latter meaning. The opposite of a utopia, dystopia is a concept which surpassed utopia in popularity in the fictional literature from the 1950s onwards, chiefly because of the impact of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In 1876, writer Charles Renouvier published a novel called Uchronia (French Uchronie)., reprinted 1988, . The neologism, using chronos instead of topos, has since been used to refer to non-existent idealized times in fiction, such as Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962).
According to the Philosophical Dictionary, proto-utopian ideas begin as early as the period of ancient Greece and Rome, medieval heretics, peasant revolts and establish themselves in the period of the early capitalism, reformation and Renaissance (Hus, Müntzer, More, Campanella), democratic revolutions (Meslier, Morelly, Mably, Winstanley, later Babeufists, Blanquists,) and in a period of turbulent development of capitalism that highlighted antagonisms of capitalist society (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Cabet, Lamennais, Proudhon and their followers).Filozofický slovník 1977, s. 561
Definitions and interpretations Famous quotes from writers and characters about utopia: "There is nothing like a dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow." —Victor Hugo "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." —Oscar Wilde "Utopias are often only premature truths." —Alphonse de Lamartine "None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace." —Theodor W. Adorno "I think that there is always a part of utopia in any romantic relationship." —Pedro Almodovar "In ourselves alone the absolute light keeps shining, a sigillum falsi et sui, mortis et vitae aeternae [false signal and signal of eternal life and death itself], and the fantastic move to it begins: to the external interpretation of the daydream, the cosmic manipulation of a concept that is utopian in principle." —Ernst Bloch "When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build." —Henry Kuttner "A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that if these [United] States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other." —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 6. "We are all utopians, so soon as we wish for something different." – Henri LefebvreLefebvre, Henri (2000 ) Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. London: The Athlone Press, p.75. "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 GoldmanEmma Goldman, "Socialism Caught in the Political Trap ," in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kates Shulman, freely available at the Anarchist Library.
Utopian socialist Étienne Cabet in his utopian book The Voyage to Icaria cited the definition from the contemporary Dictionary of ethical and political sciences:
Marx and Engels used the word "utopia" to denote unscientific social theories.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek told about utopia:
Philosopher Milan Šimečka said:
Philosopher Richard Stahel said:
Origins
In Plato's Republic, Socrates discusses existing regimes and imagines an ideal city named Kallipolis, ruled by a class of philosopher kings. The Republic sets out a system that would categorize citizens into a rigid class structure of "golden", "silver", and "bronze" classes. The golden citizens are trained in a rigorous 50-year-long educational program to be "philosopher kings". The city is designed to avoid both extreme wealth and poverty. The educational program for the rulers is the central notion of the proposal.
During the 16th century, Thomas More's book Utopia proposed an ideal society of the same name. More's utopia is inspired by Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics, and its seriocomic style from the dialogues of Lucian. Utopian socialists and other readers accept this imaginary society as the realistic blueprint for a working nation, while others have postulated that Thomas More intended nothing of the sort. Some say 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 dual meaning 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 homophonic prefix eu-, meaning "good", also resonates in the word, with the implication that the perfectly "good place" is really "no place".
Mythical and religious utopias
In many cultures, societies, and religions, 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 humanity and nature. People'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 their God or gods. According to one anthropological theory, hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society.
These mythical or religious archetypes are inscribed in many cultures and resurge with special vitality when people are in difficult and critical times. However, in utopias, the projection of the myth does not take place towards the remote past but either towards the future or towards distant and fictional places, imagining that at some time in the future, at some point in space, or beyond death, there must exist the possibility of living happily.
In the United States and Europe, during the Second Great Awakening (ca. 1790–1840) and thereafter, many radical religious groups formed utopian societies in which faith could govern all aspects of members' lives. These utopian societies included the Shakers, who originated in England in the 18th century and arrived in America in 1774. A number of religious utopian societies from Europe came to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, including the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness (led by Johannes Kelpius (1667–1708), the Ephrata Cloister (established in 1732) and the Harmony Society, among others. The Harmony Society was a Christian theosophy and pietist group founded in Iptingen, Germany, in 1785. Due to religious persecution by the Lutheran Church and the government in Württemberg,Robert Paul Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities (2003) p. 38 the society moved to the United States on October 7, 1803, settling in Pennsylvania. On February 15, 1805, about 400 followers formally organized the Harmony Society, placing all their goods in common. The group lasted until 1905, making it one of the longest-running financially successful communes in American history.
The Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in Oneida, New York, was a utopian religious commune that lasted from 1848 to 1881. Although this utopian experiment has become better known today for its manufacture of Oneida silverware, it was one of the longest-running communes in American history. The Amana Colonies were communal settlements in Iowa, started by radical German pietists, which lasted from 1855 to 1932. The Amana Corporation, manufacturer of refrigerators and household appliances, was originally started by the group. Other examples are Fountain Grove (founded in 1875), Riker's Holy City and other Californian utopian colonies between 1855 and 1955 (Hine), as well as Sointula in British Columbia, Canada. The Amish and Hutterites can also be considered an attempt towards religious utopia. A wide variety of intentional communities with some type of faith-based ideas have also started across the world.
Anthropologist Richard Sosis examined 200 communes in the 19th-century United States, both religious and secular (mostly utopian socialist). 39 percent of the religious communes were still functioning 20 years after their founding while only 6 percent of the secular communes were. The number of costly sacrifices that a religious commune demanded from its members had a linear effect on its longevity, while in secular communes demands for costly sacrifices did not correlate with longevity and the majority of the secular communes failed within 8 years. Sosis cites anthropologist Roy Rappaport in arguing that rituals and laws are more effective when sacralized. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites Sosis's research in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind as the best evidence that religion is an adaptive solution to the free-rider problem by enabling cooperation without kinship. Evolutionary medicine researcher Randolph M. Nesse and theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard have argued instead that because humans with altruistic tendencies are preferred as social partners they receive fitness advantages by social selection,Multiple sources:
with Nesse arguing further that social selection enabled humans as a species to become extraordinarily cooperative and capable of creating culture.