Aristotle's doubts about the workability of Plato's Republic, based on the observation that its citizens would lack incentives to make them work, remained to be countered and the end of the eighteenth century produced Malthus's objection – that population increase would always outstrip resources no matter how much Technology increased production – to the utopian optimism of William Godwin (1756-1836).ĭespite the international popularity of Mercier's book, the nineteenth century was well advanced before the utopian potential of scientific progress was widely celebrated in English literature. Scepticism was not, however, entirely overcome. Another member of the school, Restif de la Bretonne, concluded La découverte australe par un homme volant, ou le Dédale français ( 1781) with a description of a utopian state based on the principles of natural philosophy and scientific advancement. L S Mercier's pioneering euchronian novel, L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante ( 1771 trans as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772) proposed that the perfectibility of mankind was not only possible but inevitable, with the aid of science, mathematics and the mechanical arts. It was left to a school of French philosophers during the second half of the eighteenth century to become the first strident champions of the idea that moral and technological progress went hand in hand. Glanvil in 1676) but works such as The Blazing World ( 1668) by Margaret Cavendish, Gulliver's Travels ( 17) by Jonathan Swift and Rasselas ( 1759) by Samuel Johnson embody a very different attitude, Parodying the efforts of Scientists and inventors and mocking their presumed unworldliness. Bacon's claims for the utopian potential of technological advance are extravagant, and inspired at least two later writers to undertake the fragment's completion ( R H Esquire in 1660 and Jos. The scientific imagination first became influential in utopian thinking in the seventeenth century: an awareness of the advancement of scientific knowledge and of the role that science might play in transforming society is very evident in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (bound in with Sylva Sylvarum 1626 1627 chap) and Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun ( 1637). It seems sensible to regard this as the point at which utopian literature acquired a character conceptually similar to that of sf. When this happened, utopias ceased to be imaginary constructions with which contemporary society might be compared, and began to be speculative statements about real future possibilities. Frank Manuel, in Utopias and Utopian Thought (anth 1966), argues that a significant shift in utopian thought took place when writers changed from talking about a better place (eutopia) to talking about a better time (euchronia), under the influence of notions of historical and social progress. Alternatively, it might be argued that only those utopias which embody some notion of scientific advancement qualify as sf – the latter view is in keeping with most Definitions of SF. It can be argued that all utopias are sf, in that they are exercises in hypothetical Sociology and political science. The term was coined by Thomas More in Utopia (Latin edition 1516 trans 1551 many editions since), although More's work has far more Satire than practical Politics in it he derived the word from "outopia" (no place) rather than "eutopia" (good place), although modern usage generally implies the latter, and modern works recapitulating More's ideas – including The New Moon: A Romance of Reconstruction ( 1918) by Oliver Onions and The Rebel Passion ( 1929) by Kay Burdekin – do so more earnestly than he did. The concept of a utopia or "Ideal State" is linked to religious ideas of Heaven or the Promised Land and to folkloristic ideas like the Isles of the Blessed, but it is essentially a future-historical goal, to be achieved by the active efforts of human beings, not a transcendental goal reserved as a reward for those who follow a particularly virtuous path in life.
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