UTOPIA, an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under perfect conditions. Hence Utopian is used to denote a visionary reform, which fails to recognize defects in human na ture. The word first occurs in Sir Thomas More's Utopia, pub lished in Latin as De optimo Reipublicae statu, deque nova znsula Utopia (Louvain, 1516). It was compounded by More (q.v.) from the Greek a), not, and rinros, a place, no-where.
The idea of a Utopia is, even in literature, far older than More's romance; it appears in the Tirnaeus of Plato and is fully developed in his Republic. The idealized description of Sparta in Plutarch's life of Lycurgus belongs to the same class of literary Utopias. A similar idea occurs in the Greek, and the mediaeval Norse, Celtic and Arab legends which describe an earthly paradise in the western or Atlantic ocean (see ATLANTIS). Few of these survived after the explorations of Columbus, Vasco da Gama and others in the 15th century ; but in literature More's Utopia set a new fashion : the imaginary voyager arrives at the ideal state. In Bacon's New Atlantis (1624-29) science is the key to universal happiness; Tommaso Campanella's Civitas Solis (1623) por trays a communistic society; James Harrington's Oceana (1656), which had a profound influence upon political thought in America, is a treatise rather than a romance, and is founded on the ideas that property, especially in land, is the basis of political power, and that the executive should only be controlled for a short period by the same rhan or men. With these may be compared the Christian
Utopias, J. V. Andreae's Christianopolis and S. Golt's Nova Solyma (1648). Bernard de Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is unique in that it describes the downfall of an ideal commonwealth. Other Utopias are the "Voyage en Salente" in Fenelon's Telemaque (1699), Vairasse's Histoire des Sevarambes (1716) ; Mercier's L'An 2440 (1742) ; James Burgh's Account of the Cessares (1764); J. B. Say's Olbie ( I800) ; Etienne Cabet's Voyage en Icarie (1848) ; Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race (1871) ; Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (19oI) ; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) ; William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) H. G. Wells's Anticipations (19oI), A Modern Utopia (1905) and New Worlds for Old (1908). Many Utopias, like the Fable of the Bees and Erewhon, are satires. Others are inspired by socialistic ideals ; among these may be mentioned Freiland, ein soziales Zukunftsbild (189o) and Reise nach Freiland (1893), by the Austrian Theodor Hertzka (b. Budapest, portraying a commune in Central Africa.