Who invented utopia

In , railroad entrepreneur George Pullman of Pullman Palace Car fame launched the ambitious model village, named after himself. He aimed for the town to run as a business and return a profit to investors. Second, there were no public gatherings of any size.

Third, workers had to buy goods in the over-priced Pullman shops. And fourth, no blacks were allowed. In short, it was a disastrous mixture of the worst of centrally-controlled socialism and grasping capitalism — with racism thrown in for good measure. Following the great market collapse of , Pullman hiked rents. In , 4, Pullman residents, like thousands of workers across the US at that time, went on strike. The situation got violent; troops went in to quell the uprising.

The government forced Pullman to sell his town. He died in so widely loathed, he had to be buried 12 feet underground for fear that his body would be dug up and desecrated by disgruntled employees.

And since most utopias are inflexible, what happens to your ideal community when market conditions — which are outside your control — change? At around the same time in England, William Morris was concocting a far gentler version of paradise. The generously bearded Victorian hero wrote one of the great utopian fantasies, News from Nowhere — a book full of charm, wit and good ideas. Morris himself was absurdly energetic, managing to pursue simultaneous careers as a poet, artist, novelist, printer, pamphleteer, painter, designer, typesetter, business man, socialist pioneer and rabble-rouser he was thrown in jail for attending an anti-war rally.

Morris is dearly loved by the British left; the great Marxist historian EP Thompson wrote a long and adoring biography of him which emphasised his socialist principles. Unlike the big-headed Pullman, though, Morris never imposed his utopian visions on anyone else by actually creating a commune or village. He was a romantic who became a revolutionary. As he wrote of himself:. Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked path straight?

News from Nowhere was published in Really, Morris wanted all people to live what he called a refined life, to have the leisure time to read and play music and think and be poets. John Ruskin, another medievalist and fan of the guild system, was outlining projects for ideal village communities, while the Arts and Crafts movement also was inspired by the Middle Ages.

Morris was attacking the sordid utilitarianism which dominated his own age. Money has been abolished. There is no private property. The inhabitants have a lot of fun: the narrator, for example, records with pleasure that dinner is served with a bottle of very good Bordeaux.

Immediately following Morris came HG Wells, who wrote a dozen utopian and dystopian novels. Tolstoy, an anarchist and a Christian, held that the state was responsible for most of the bad stuff: taxes, wars and general irresponsibility. Tolstoy counselled passive resistance and non-violence instead.

The familiar elements were there: a return to handicrafts and small-scale agriculture, partial rejection of the gewgaws of the modern world, communal dining and shared expenditure. Two of these communes still exist today in the UK. One is the Brotherhood Church of Stapleton, which, according to a recent New Yorker piece, is home to four humans, a deaf cat, a few hens and an enormous cow.

The other is the Whiteway Colony in the Cotswolds, formed in More village than commune, Whiteway is a collection of 68 houses loosely bound by a monthly meeting.

In a young Indian philosopher started to correspond with Tolstoy. In , the young man — Gandhi —launched a cooperative colony in South Africa which he named Tolstoy Farm. One of my favourite 20th-Century utopian societies, however, is the anarchist occupation of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. It is described without sentiment by George Orwell, who fought for the anarchists, in his account Homage to Catalonia.

Meanwhile, utopias continued to hatch from the imaginations of novelists. 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. Meanwhile, a hard-nosed anti-utopian right has scoffed at the unreality of such proposals, rather like the Daily Mail on the new Labour leader. Book Two of Utopia is presented to the reader as a direct discourse on various aspects of Utopian society. It is, however, important to remember the fictional frame in which this discourse exists. Book Two is in fact More's paraphrase of Hythloday's description of Utopia.

Between Thomas More the author and Hythloday the teller of the story is a remove of two fictional levels mediated by More the character, who does not agree with the more radical proposals Hythloday makes. Hythloday begins by discussing the geography and history of Utopia, each of which proves perfect for nurturing an ideal society. Utopia occupies an island that is as isolated as it wants to be; the Utopians interact with the rest of the world on their terms.

Utopia needs no real external resources, is well defended against any sort of attack, is fruitful enough to carry on a surplus in trade, and allows for easy transport of goods and people within its own territory.

With the story of General Utopus the ideal geography is given a source: the island was built, cut off from the mainland thousands of years ago. General Utopus conquered the territory and installed in a single historical moment the roots of the present-day Utopian society. Utopia, then, did not develop in a way comparable to any other state in the history of mankind. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Nov. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs.

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