Utopian Thought in the Western World [antikvár]

PrefaceOur book is constructed of seven major Utopian constellations and a few minor ones, arranged in chronological order, preceded by two exordia, one methodological and the other mythological, the whole crowned with a prophetic peroration. An essay form that selects examples and suggests general lines of development but does not pretend to exhaustiveness was deliberately chosen. There has been no attempt to string out long lists of titles, which are easily available in a growing number of bibhographies. Unlike Erasmus, who claims to have composed The Praise of Folly in a week, we have been preoccupied with the Utopian thought of the West for more than a quarter of a century. It is time to call a halt.We have included pictures, as Giambattista Vico did in his New Science, and with the same end in view: "to give the reader an idea of the work before beginning and to allow him to recall its content the more readily, with the help of his imagination, after having finished." Happily, an underlying conception of our study was prefigured in two fragments of a predella painted around 1445 by Giovanni di Paolo of Siena. In one, Adam and Eve are being pushed out of the Garden of Eden, while God the Father points to a map of the barren world to which they are banished. Four rivers flow out of the earthly paradise, symbolizing to latter-day commentators the ancient and medieval wellsprings of the idea of Utopia, with its yearning for a return to the blessed state from which mankind has been exiled. Even while Utopian man hopes to re-create paradise on earth, he consoles himself with the vision of a paradise in heaventhe subject of a second fragment of the same predella. There the saintly ones, clad in graceful fifteenth-century costumes, are engaged in gentle converse with one another in a tranquil garden. The gnostic Simon Magus likened paradise to the womban analogy recognized in the map of the island sketched for the Louvain 1516 edition ofUtopia. We have always been aware of the creators of the Western Utopian tradition as persons. Without prejudice to the rest, a few have been singled out as illustrations from among the thousands who have renewed the myth of paradise in a secular translation: Thomas More, Jan Amos Co-menius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Restif de la Bretonne, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, Wilham Morris.Earlier versions of parts of the text appeared in issues of Daedalus on "Utopia and Utopian Thought" (Spring 1956), "Myth, Symbol, and Culture" (Winter 1972), "In Praise of Books" (Winter 1976), and "Rousseau for Our Time" (Summer 1978). We owe much to the Editor of Daedalus, Stephen R. Graubard, who over the years has been a steadfast friend and forthright critic. The Prophets of Paris (Harvard University Press, 1962) has been drawn upon freely, and so have "The Philosophes in Doubt," a lecture published by the Wilham Andrews Clark Memorial Library (1978), and "Reconsideration: Thomas More," The New Republic (June 24, 1978).