The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren review, can the ideal society ever exist?
Article excerpt
Joad Raymond Wren's intellectual history traces humanity's long obsession with imagined perfect societies, from Thomas More's 1516 Latin pun to Ursula K. Le Guin's speculative fiction. The book explores a fundamental paradox: utopia, by definition, cannot exist, More's title itself plays on Greek words meaning both "good place" and "no place." Yet across centuries, writers have deployed utopian thinking as a tool for social criticism, philosophical exploration, and imagining alternatives to the present. Wren examines how the genre has evolved, what it reveals about each era's anxieties and desires, and whether the impossible ideal serves a purpose beyond mere fantasy.
This fascinating intellectual history of imagined paradises takes us from Thomas More to Ursula K Le Guin
By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek “eu-topos”, meaning good place, and “ou-topos”, meaning not a place at all. It might have been a compact warning that one should never attempt to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried usually witnessed the model societies they founded devolving into grungily dysfunctional communes, weird sex cults, or both.
In this richly diverting intellectual history of the idea, we begin, as we must, with Plato, and the zany prescriptions of his Republic (“we should neutralise the poets’ influence on mothers”). Passing in silence over the potentially utopian aspects of Jesus’s thinking, we arrive at More’s utopia, where “nothing is private”, and so “the common affairs be earnestly looked upon”. The great Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a utopia of rational scientific experimentation, which, Wren suggests ingeniously, might have inspired Wakanda in the Marvel Black Panther films. The 17th-century duchess Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess elected by a world of human-animal hybrids who like science. In the 18th century, Sarah Scott’s Millenium [sic] Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland during the first world war.
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