Genre History and Ideology in Utopian Literature, 1750–1840
Authors: Balasopoulos Antonis 
Published: November 2024

During the Renaissance, utopias existed outside known and mappable space as well as beyond known historical time. They were thus doubly removed from the historical, evolving world, instead constituting static models of a better world to which no transition appeared practicably possible. With the publication of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’an 2440 in 1771, a drastic change occurs: utopia is henceforth transformed from an unreachable space existing in an insular time to the known world as it has evolved in the future. The “temporalization of utopia,” as it is known, depends on the rise and eventual hegemony, during the pre-revolutionary Enlightenment and in the first years after the American and French Revolutions, of ideas regarding social, institutional, moral and scientific progress as an active principle of history. Though Enlightenment thought is by no means either homogeneous or lacking in skepticism regarding the factuality of progress or the imminence of utopia, the writings of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and, far more unambiguously, those of the Marquis of Condorcet, testify to a growing degree of confidence in the dynamic and evolutionary nature of historical development and, ultimately, in the prospects for infinite perfectibility—in other words, in the ontological openness of time and history. Mercier’s paradigm-shifting novel emerges on the ground of such ideological shifts but also betrays the existence of significant ambiguities in the Enlightenment’s philosophical legacy, since it both foregrounds and denies the connection between future progress and political revolution, presenting its reader with often contradictory content and an internally divided form.

Ironically, the very growth of confidence in the imminence of utopia entailed, by the early 19th century, a rejection of narrative fiction among the three most prominent utopists of the period: Henri Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier. Their shared belief in the practical applicability of their schemes marks a clear departure from the playful or aporetic character of utopian fictions in the Renaissance and heralds the rise to dominance of system-building blueprints. A distrust of the political sphere, construed as one of violent antagonism among classes and group interests, as well as an emphasis on devising ways through which the social sphere can be harmonized in the interests of shared prosperity and happiness, is characteristic of all three thinkers, as is a cosmopolitan spirit and an aversion to nationalist chauvinisms. Naturally, differences are also present among them. Saint-Simon privileges the role of scientific specialists, manufacturers, and merchants in securing rule by the productive classes and the waning of both economic parasitism and political violence in the future. Owen emphasizes the role of education in reforming social mores and sees experimental communities founded on his teaching of new and rational principles as capable of instituting “an entirely new state of society” that can be emulated internationally. Fourier, meanwhile, focuses his energy on devising methods for reconciling the conflictual personalities and passions of individuals with social harmony, and for harmonizing pleasure and social regulation, freedom and organization.

The narrative utopia would return after the hopes of the utopian system-builders of the early 19th century and their followers were disappointed through a combination of internecine conflict, the economic failure or repression of the social experiments inspired by their writings, and the rise of working-class militancy, particularly in France, Britain, and Prussia. Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840) can be faulted for both aesthetic failure and rather repressive emphases on homogeneity, discipline, surveillance, and a retrogressive conception of gender relations, but it also contains the seeds of fairly important innovations, among which the most important for later developments in the genre are its sophisticated mode of braiding together the temporal horizons of history and utopia, its engagement with the occasional inevitability of revolution and of revolutionary violence, its concurrent attentiveness to the importance of the political moment of crisis, its developed exploration of the complexities of revolutionary transition, and, finally, its accommodation, despite its otherwise doctrinaire spirit, of a degree of open-ended dialogism which utopian fiction had not enjoyed since More’s founding text.