Like Aristotle’s heavenly bodies, fixed to the celestial vault, the island of Utopia is of a quite different nature from the cities we know, subject as they are to growth and corruption. All its characteristics are signs of perfection: uniformity, symmetry, transparency, an exact hierarchy, quasi-immobility. The island of Utopia is somewhere else, not only because it has no assignable location in the known world,Įven if its spatial and local dimensions are clearly marked, but also because it is a perfect city. No one knows precisely where, but somewhere other than here and now. providing no opening, no way out towards a different horizon. Thinking about utopia has been possible only when the historical reality of situations, societies and states has appeared totally overloaded, i.e. This is why I reflect upon the Constitution of the Utopians, so wise, so morally irreproachable, among whom with theįewest possible laws all is regulated for the good of all, in such a way that merit is rewarded and that, in a sharing from which no one is excluded, everyone has nonetheless a large part.”
People who even then are not entirely satisfied, whilst all others are in the direst poverty. This is what Thomas More says in the first book of “Utopia”: “It seems to me that where private properties exist, where all men measure all things in relation to money, it is hardly possible toĮstablish, in public affairs, a regime at once just and prosperous, unless you esteem it just that the best things belong to the worst persons, or unless you judge it well that all goods be shared among the fewest
Is overloaded in this way, we have to look for an elsewhere. For Plato the organization and laws of the republic have to be inscribed in the perceptible world, however difficult this may be.īut utopia can be thought of only when the relationship is reversed, when the real appears overloaded and offers no way out of war, violence, cupidity, exploitation, hunger and injustice. Thinking about utopia has been possible only when the historical reality of situations appears to offer no way out.īy contrast, for Plato what has no place is the perceptible society of the here and now, in perpetual change, subject to all sorts of evils and incapable of taking human beings to where their true essence leads It is, in fact, that which par excellence has a place in the intelligible world. But this usage of the notion of utopia is quite illegitimate, because utopia, by its very etymology, means without-place, whereas Plato’s republic absolutely does not correspond Thus Plato’s “Republic” is commonly described as theįirst philosophical utopia. Utopia is often spoken of in a general, imprecise way, to characterize any conception of the state that is considered an unrealizable ideal. Insofar as they involve the status of utopia. Here I should like to reflect on that beginning and that end, Modernity came to a close with the collapse of all those attempts, both collective and liberal, that had been made to bring utopia about in history.
The modern world was inaugurated by two books with opposing perspectives, published at the same time in the early years of the 16th century: Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and Thomas More’s “Utopia.” The category of the Utopian, then, besides its usual and justly depreciatory meaning, possesses this other meaning – which, far from being necessarily abstract and turned away from the world, is on the contraryĬentrally preoccupied with the world: that of going beyond the natural march of events.Įven among bourgeois economists, there is hardly a serious thinker who will deny that it is possible, by means of currently existing material and intellectual forces of production, to put an end to hunger and poverty,Īnd that the present state of things is due to the socio-political organization of the world. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.