Page 155 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1932 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Thomas More’s Utopia: Of Their Towns, Particularly of Amaurot

A frequently documented fantasy in both folk and for- There is likewise another river that runs by it,
mal literatures of many different cultures across world which, though it is not great, yet it runs pleasantly,
history is that of the ideal world in which there is com- for it rises out of the same hill on which the town
fort, ease, and plenty for all. Idealized lands and king- stands, and so runs down through it, and falls into
doms preoccupied the medieval mind. This excerpt the Anider. The inhabitants have fortified the
from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1515) provides just fountain-head of this river, which springs a little
such an example. Sir Thomas More (later canonized St. without the town; so that if they should happen to
Thomas More) is famous for both Utopia and for his be besieged, the enemy might not be able to stop or
martyrdom. As Chancellor to the English King Henry divert the course of the water, nor poison it; from
VIII he refused to sanction Henry’s divorce of Queen thence it is carried in earthen pipes to the lower
Catherine. More was imprisoned, tried, and executed. streets; and for those places of the town to which
the water of that shall river cannot be conveyed, they
He that knows one of their towns knows them all,
have great cisterns for receiving the rain-water,
they are so like one another, except where the situa-
which supplies the want of the other. . .
tion makes some difference. I shall therefore describe
They cultivate their gardens with great care, so
one of them; and none is so proper as Amaurot; for
that they have vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers in
as none is more eminent, all the rest yielding in
them; and all is so well ordered, and so finely kept,
precedence to this, because it is the seat of their Su-
that I never saw gardens anywhere that were both so
preme Council, so there was none of them better
fruitful and so beautiful as theirs. And this humor of
known to me, I having lived five years altogether in it.
ordering their gardens so well is not only kept up by
It lies upon the side of a hill, or rather a rising
the pleasure they find in it, but also by an emulation
ground: its figure is almost square, for from the one
between the inhabitants of the several streets, who
side of it, which shoots up almost to the top of the
vie with each other; and there is indeed nothing
hill, it runs down in a descent for two miles to the
belonging to the whole town that is both more use-
river Anider; but it is a little broader the other way
ful and more pleasant. So that he who founded the
that runs along by the bank of that river. . .

If the eighteenth-century American and French revolu- century. Ironically, the nineteenth-century industrial soci-
tions institutionalized political utopianism, the nine- eties that Marx imagined to be the most fertile ground for
teenth century bred its most diverse intellectuals and his ideas did not produce the kind of revolution he pre-
practitioners.While some of these were religious, like the dicted, which occurred instead in agrarian countries like
Mormons and the Shakers, many were secular, like the Russia, China, Korea,Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba in
American Brook Farm Community (the object of the twentieth century. Moreover, by developing Leninist
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 satire, The Blithedale and Stalinist models of government, the totalitarian
Romance), William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement regimes that succeeded these revolutions (and their fascist
and the Fabian Socialists in England, and the French counterparts in Spain, Germany, and Italy) encouraged
utopian socialists the Comte de Saint-Simon (1760– the creation of a “dystopian” literature, including Aldous
1825), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and Pierre-Joseph Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s
Proudhon (1809–1865). 1984 (1949).
Preeminent among the intellectuals was Karl Marx
(1818–1883), who towered above the age both for the Future Prospects
extent of his social, historical, and economic analyses and Although the dominant utopian ideologies of the twen-
for the breadth of his influence well into the twentieth tieth century were secular, the twenty-first century is