Searching for Utopia

What could be more historical than the search for utopia? Visions of an ideal place elsewhere that is better than our own are not only persistent in human history, they are also deeply revealing of that history. Past imaginings of a fairer social organisation, of a more secure existence and of a more harmonious environment all expose the failings of the time they arise from as well as testing the limits of an age’s thought. Telling this history in its entirety is the goal of this concise yet comprehensive and richly illustrated book.

The historian of utopia is immediately faced with some difficult decisions: whether to focus on literary accounts of ideal societies, or to broaden the inquiry to practical attempts to realise them; whether to start the story with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), or to see More’s book as a remarkably provocative and successful articulation of a more permanent human impulse; whether to treat science fiction as a natural extension of utopian thought or as its own separate field. Claeys solves these problems with a generous policy of inclusion, not wasting valuable words on whether such-and-such a book, or picture, or film, is ‘really’ utopian or not. As such, this is a book about utopia that takes in much else on the way. And, although it does not assume any prior acquaintance with its subject, as the book travels from Gilgamesh and the ‘Pure Land’ of Chinese Daoism to Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) the reader’s general knowledge is firmly stretched.

Yet this is not to say that Claeys does not have a vision of what utopia is. It is important for him that it should not merely be an account of perfection: utopia (like More’s Utopia itself) must be plausible, even realistic. This definition leads Claeys to one of his most striking thoughts: that the fictitious location that is such a prominent aspect of so many utopian visions ‘is unimportant’. It is precisely in order to lend credence to their visions of a better society that utopias are located in unknown southern lands, or underground, or in outer space.

Utopia is also sharply distinguished, for Claeys, from the religious yearning for a better future state. Although he dutifully discusses religiously motivated utopianism – outlined by Gerrard Winstanley in the 17th century, or Henri de Saint-Simon in the 19th – he is also impatient with utopian ideas that simply arrive at the social code of the prevalent religion. As well as manifesting a repeated urge towards a communal life and being a force in the history of self-government it is clear that Claeys also finds in the utopian tradition an impetus towards secularism.

One of the book’s less successful claims is that ‘the utopian construct is indisputably a global one’. Not because the claim is implausible; simply because one chapter on ‘Extra-European visions of the ideal society’ out of 14 cannot do justice to the question. Though it looks at its beginning and its end towards China and intermittently towards Islamic ideas this remains a book focused on European and, latterly, North American history. It is Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) that is (not unjustly) ‘the definitive science-fiction film of its epoch’, rather than Godard’s Alphaville (1965) or Honda’s Matango (1963).

This is a rich, circumspect history and one that Claeys knows a great deal about. While some of its themes are too broad it is also a magnificent primer to a tradition. Fittingly, too, since the search for utopia has always been pursued through images as well as words and deeds, it is unquestionably the best-illustrated book ever published on the history of
utopianism.

Richard Serjeantson is the editor of Meric Casaubon's treatise Generall Learning (1999).