DO WE NEED UTOPIA?

TAKING its name from the fictional land depicted in Sir Thomas More's book of 1516, utopia has become a generic term for all imaginary worlds in which a society radically different from our own exists--one that is normally in every respect superior to the real world. It is a notion that is currently out of fashion, for nowadays utopian thought is suspect for its supposedly totalitarian tendencies.

Recent years have seen the collapse of more than one would-be real-life utopia, and the dream of an ideal society--long considered essential for the fulfilment of human potential--has for many people turned into a nightmare. Even the way the word is now used in everyday speech reflects its current discredit. It has become synonymous with wipe-dreams, unrealistic ambitions, and airyfairy ideas. For many people, the utopian vision has finally been laid to rest.

Such a view may be premature. Contemporary historical, political and philosophical thought has not entirely lost its utopian dimension. Although utopianism has been condemned for the ideological wrong turnings it has encouraged, perhaps it remains indispensable if we are to conceive of alternative models of the future.

It is often wrongly thought that utopianism is a form of literary escapism. Its practitioners have usually been deeply involved with the political, social and economic concerns of their day. The aim of most utopian works has been to make people reflect critically about their time. The ideal societies they have depicted have always been related in some way to the values of the world around them.

Thomas More himself was a humanist, diplomat and politician whose rose to be lord chancellor of England. The marvellous island he described in his Utopia housed an ideal society that served to contrast with descriptions of an existing England sapped by poverty, taxation and rapacity. More was to pay for his audacity with his head.

Similarly, the Italian author Tommaso Campanella, writing from prison, proposed the ideal community of his City of the Sun (1602) as an alternative to the injustices of the contemporary world in fact he even sought help to turn his ideas into reality. James Harrington's Oceana, published in 1656, was a challenge to the England of Oliver Cromwell, while the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, in his New Atlantis of 1627, drew up a programme of political action for an enlightened monarch.

History may have inspired these imaginary worlds, but some utopias have in their turn affected history. Writing in the first shock of the European encounter with America, Thomas More thought that things no longer possible in the Old World could perhaps be brought to fruition in the New. In fact there were several attempts to put his ideas into practice in sixteenth-century Latin America, from the communes of farmers and craftsmen established at Michoacan in Mexico by Bishop Vasco de Quiroga to the ideal world of Verapaz--literally, "True Peace"--that Bartolome de las Casas sought to create at Chiapas.

In the succeeding centures, the missions and Indian settlements--the so-called "Reductions"--set up by the Jesuits over a vast area of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay drew the inspiration for their theocratic regimes from both Campanella and Plato. In the nineteenth century, various attempts to set up utopian socialist communities were made in England, France, the United States and Latin America.

Criticizing the present

to change the future

Every project for an ideal society is an attempt to invent the future. That is what distinguishes utopianism from ideology. As Karl Mannheim, the author of Ideology and Utopia (1929), put it, utopias bear a message of hope in the sense that they signify that change is possible. Whilst ideology is a vehicle for the world view of people in power, utopias are by their very nature subversive they oppose existing authority and challenge the view of reality that it imposes. …