It was a pun - the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means 'a good place'. So at the very heart of the word is a vital question: can a perfect world ever be realised?
It is unclear as to whether the book is a serious projection of a better way of life, or a satire that gave More a platform from which to discuss the chaos of European politics. More was an English lawyer, writer, and statesman. Hythloday explains how it is that their six-hour work day is adequate for supplying the needs of the community. Everybody is engaged in productive labor, Syphogrants and priests only excepted. He contrasts this arrangement with that in Europe, where one class of persons performs all of the necessary labor while a considerable number of persons perform either no labor or are occupied with frivolous services that cater to the vanities of the rich.
A very select group is exempted from working at a trade because of a special aptitude for intellectual pursuits, to which they apply themselves wholly; from that group are chosen the magistrates, priests, ambassadors, and even the Prince.
The trouble with modern European society lies in the fact that a considerable segment of society, the leisure class, fails to contribute significantly to any necessary productivity.
That is a cardinal point in Hythloday's complaint against the class system in the first book of Utopia. Instead of being worshipped, gold and silver should, he suggests, be used to make chamber pots. War is fit only for beasts, and standing armies should be disbanded. Labour should be reduced to a minimum, though the TUC might balk at the suggestion that workers would use some of their leisure time to attend public lectures before daybreak.
The perfection of his utopia is not tarnished in his view by the fact that it contains slaves. Adultery would be punished by the strictest form of slavery. Feminists, however, should note that women would enjoy the same prerogative. Brothels would be abolished, but so would alehouses. There would be no lawyers a generous-hearted proposal, since More was one himself , but no tolerance for those who waste time, either. Judging from that literature, there are really two kinds of utopia.
There are carnivalesque societies in which, instead of working, everyone will drink, feast and copulate from dawn to dusk. In one such 18th-century fantasy, men and women bereft of all body hair leap naked into fountains, while the progressively minded narrator watches on.
Whether his pleasure is entirely theoretical remains unclear. There are also more austere utopias, in which everything is odourless and antiseptic, intolerably streamlined and sensible. In these meticulously planned countries of the mind, the natives tend to jaw on for hours about the efficiency of their sanitary arrangements or the ingenuity of their electoral system. It is reassuring to see him practising a very English rationality in such exotically unfamiliar circumstances.
On the one hand, his ideal society is a high-minded, fairly puritanical place, one likely to appeal to the stereotypical Hampstead vegetarian; on the other hand, its inhabitants are genial, laid-back and agreeably disinclined to do much work. Alternative universes are really devices for embarrassing the present, as imaginary cultures are used to estrange and unsettle our own. As such, they have been largely the product of the left. Instead of procreating within a family unit, these leaders leave the city once a year for a wild sex orgy.
The resulting children, happily ignorant of their real parentage and brought up by the state, become the new generation of guardians. Various medieval works also imagined what an ideal society might look like. A very different idea of utopia, meanwhile, also entered the mainstream by the midth Century. This was the Land of Cockaygne, a utopia concocted by medieval peasants and preserved in the Kildare Poems, compiled around in Ireland. The Land of Cockaygne, as imagined by Pieter Brueghel, was a land of fun and equality — and no work.
Memorably imagined by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in his painting, Cockaygne was a land of no work, equality between men and women and no authority figures. As the poem goes:. A key feature of the Land of Cockaygne? Free love. Monks and nuns cavort freely. After prayers, the nuns throw their clothes off and jump into the lake:.
When the young monks see that sport, Straightway thither they resort, And coming to the nuns anon, Each monk taketh to him one, And, swiftly bearing forth his prey, Carries her to the Abbey grey, And teaches her an orison, Jigging up and jigging down.
Monkish life itself was under attack from the forces of the Reformation, and was soon to reach a climax with the dissolution of the monasteries in His vision of a perfect society was a long way from the sensual self-indulgence dreamt of by the peasants in Cockagyne. Forget free love and lying around doing nothing. Instead, in Utopia, there is a class of bosses — called the Syphograuntes — who look out for work-shy slackers. And citizens are constantly being watched.
There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places. Utopia has communistic elements too. They live in perfect liberty, and have neither king nor lord. They observe no laws. They have their habitations in common, as many as six hundred sharing one building. In Utopia, private property is abolished. Every three months, the people pile up loads of stuff in the market place; anyone can come along and take what they need — like a recycling centre.
Above all, Utopia was the earnest attempt to create a fair society, not one which benefited only the rich. Most of these visions looked either backward or forward: they celebrated an old-fashioned ideal of community or envisioned a future paradise where the machines did all the work. Then in , polymath and Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon produced a book called New Atlantis , proclaiming science as saviour. His was a tech-based utopia and featured aeroplanes and submarines.
In the 17th Century, some attempted to move beyond theory and create living, breathing alternative societies. This was a turbulent period. But rather like later communist governments, the natural tendency of the ordinary people to buy and sell products, celebrate pagan rituals and try to enjoy themselves overcame. In the middle of all this ferment, a farmer called Gerrard Winstanley attempted to create an ideal colony. His followers were called Diggers — and they were the Occupy movement of their day.
The Diggers were attacked by both local men and landlords. Undeterred, Winstanley and his 20 or so followers moved to nearby Cobham Manor where they built four wooden houses.
But the local vicar paid a bunch of men — rather like when security guards are paid to remove protestors from road-building projects — to roust them and pull down any more houses or tents they made. The Diggers gave up that particular battle. But Winstanley went on to write books of utopian schemes and to join another movement with socialist overtones: the Quakers. The charismatic George Fox was the leader of the Quakers.
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