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.
From Plato to Wakanda
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.
Patterns in Utopian Thought
Some patterns emerge: many utopias employ a framing device in which the narrator is accidentally or fantastically transported to a new land, and then subjected to reams of expository monologue about how it all works. Families are often abolished, with children raised in common. And in Edward Bellamy's 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, Wren explains straightfacedly, "there are no law schools or lawyers, abolished here as in most utopias".
Families are allowed, though, in Voyage en Icarie, by the 19th-century French socialist Étienne Cabet, which envisions a sternly regimented communism. In 1849 Cabet founded his own model society, Icaria, in Illinois. Alas, after a few years, "Cabet's citizens were hoarding possessions; they indulged in vices including hunting and fishing, swearing, tobacco and alcohol; the women wore makeup, jewellery and perfume." Cabet's solution to this disgraceful state of affairs was to insist on even stricter rules, and to make himself president "for four years instead of one". Just so does utopia always threaten to turn into dictatorship.
Nozick's Critique
It is odd, then, that Wren never mentions a famous reckoning with the concept of utopia. In 1974, the American political philosopher Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which argues that the only morally permissible state is a "minimal" one that guarantees property rights and security, and enforces contracts. People should be free to build whatever forms of association they like on top of that, as long as membership is never coerced. But for Nozick utopias are always coercive because not everyone will agree freely with their values. "It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it," Nozick writes. "Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?"
The Sadness of Utopias
Many features of the utopias in Wren's splendid catalogue, after all, are rather sad. In Gilman's Moving the Mountain, "There are almost no pets, as they're wasteful." In Voyage en Icarie, "The decorative prints are full of useful information, as opposed to pointless landscape paintings." The Victorian artist William Morris, in News from Nowhere, describes an elite "samurai" class, his society's natural nobility, who "must not act or sing … they can't play or watch competitive sport." But inasmuch as utopias are primarily "organic machines for thinking about the premises of our thought", Wren argues, they are more like science fiction – and some indeed have been science fiction. He mentions here the 1970s "anarchist utopia" of Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed, but probably the most popular strain of utopian fiction over the last few decades has been the epic series of Culture novels by Iain M Banks, which posits fully automated luxury communism in space among a pan-galactic society of augmented humans.
Still, things regularly go awry in this ideal society, from attack by intolerant fanatics, to rogue AI utilitarianism, or unfeasibly ancient alien artefacts. The best utopian fiction therefore ends up implicitly anti-utopian as well; at its highest level of practise, perhaps, utopia vanishes into the great flow of literature itself. The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
