The english utopia [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION This book is a story of two islands — the Island of Utopia and the Island of Britain. These islands have parallel histories which help to explain each other, and that is what I have tried to make them do. For Utopia is really the island which people thought or hoped or sometimes feared that the Britain of their day might presently become, and their thoughts were affected not only by the books they had read and the ideas with which they were familiar, but by what was going on in the real world about them, by the class they belonged to and by the part that class was playing and wanted to play in relation to other classes. I have called it the English, and not the British, Utopia merely because the Utopias that have come my way have in fact been English and not Scottish, Irish or Welsh. Swift is only a partial exception to this generalisation. And I have been happy to confine myself to the Utopia of this one country because our literature is peculiarly rich in such books. This, I think, is mainly because of the very early development of bourgeois society here, and the classic form which that development took, so that English political thinkers had a peculiar pride in our history and felt a special duty to the world. This English pride sometimes takes the form of an odious smugness, and we shall discover that smugness is one of the vices which Utopia was least successful in eliminating, but sometimes it is large and generous, the desire of a man who is on to a good thing to share it with his neighbours. So here, one of the main motives of the makers of Utopias is the desire to present their conceptions of democracy, of social living, I• I i I i'i ; ! ' 1. I ' II