Fragmented Utopias

...But it is incorrect to class as Utopias either party declarations, like Babeuf's "Manifesto of the Equals," or projects for piecemeal social or political reorganization, however idealistic they may appear...

...Professor Frank E. Manuel, in collaboration with Fritzie P. Manuel, has collected, in French Utopias: An Anthology of Ideal Societies, a group of writings, ranging from Sir John Mandevilla's adaptations of Vincent de Beauvais to Teilhard de Chardin's nebulous wonderings about the future, which he considers representative of the tradition...

...Ever since Thomas More set the model with a work of high literary quality, the English Utopia has become a more or less recognized fictional genre, practiced—usually only once in their careers????by an amazing number of famous, if not always great, writers...

...they include not only merely idealistic proposals, like that of the Abbe de St...

...The case of Saint-Simon, the other celebrated "Utopian Socialist," is less clear, since he talked far more generally of social organization...

...In France, on the other hand, except for the rather fragile example of Rabelais and his Abbey of Theleme, and some very minor works by writers like Anatole France, the Utopia has tended to be the province of men less concerned with literary form than the English Utopians and much more intent either on direct and obvious social satire or on the literal presentation of their visions of an ideal society...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Writer and Politics," "The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell" Ever since the Greeks speculated on the kind of society that might replace the vanished Golden Age, Utopia has been a vision tempting thoughtful men or a nightmare haunting them...

...While the Manuels include too much that is out of place, they also omit works that seem to have a just niche in a Utopian anthology...

...French Utopians have not been without fancy...

...The criteria established, it is justifiable to class both Cabet????who actually wrote an extraordinarily bad novel to set forth his ideals?and Fourier????who dilated in whimsical detail on his phalansterian world????as Utopians...

...It has ranged from the scientific and anti-scientific visions of Bacon and Swift, respectively, through Lytton's speculative Coming Race and Morris' idealistic News From Nowhere, to Wells' streamlined futures...

...There have always been marked differences between English and French Utopias and the people who have produced them...

...Among modern countries, Britain and France have produced the most Utopias, and it is reasonable to link this tendency with the intellectual and social ferments which engendered the Civil War in England and the French Revolution, and made Westminster and Paris the principal sources of the democracy we know...

...The editors include brief biographical notes on the authors and a general introduction, but they present no synopsis of the Utopias from which they publish extracts...

...first, the actual romances which present imagined worlds functioning in complete form, such as Sir Thomas More's original island...

...These flaws spring from the anthologists' own confusion, implicit in the title, of the Utopian with the merely idealistic...

...secondly, treatises which, while they are not technically fiction, nevertheless present the plan of a new society conceived in detail, a total transformation...

...Pierre for a rational European foreign policy, and vague futurist speculations like Renan's Dialogue on the Elite of Reason, but even extracts from the essentially dynamic arguments of the anarchist Proudhon, who was a lifelong critic of the Utopian attitude...

...Thus in many cases the fragments they include have little meaning for anyone who has not read the original works...

...My final criticism is of presentation...

...and on the other side of the Utopian moon, to Butler's satirical Erewhon and the grim visions of Huxley and Orwell, the anti-Utopias of those who have seen the dream turning into nightmare...

...Along with genuine Utopias like those of Mercier and Morelly...

...Fourier's visions, for example, extended into bizarre and impossible fantasies which masked a remarkable grasp of the basic nature and needs of the society in which he lived...

...It is a collection whose inclusions and omissions are equally puzzling, and whose presentation will confuse many readers unfamiliar with the subject...

...Consequently, while we often read English Utopias as romances for their own sake, we usually turn to French Utopias only to find the hidden guide lines of social and political thought, since, in the 18th century especially, fiction was often the sole channel for presenting radical ideas...

...Yet this is precisely what the Manuels do...

...Utopias of both kinds are specific and concrete...

...having attained social perfection, they are also static...

...In this respect French Utopias is much less satisfactory than Marie Louise Berneri's Journey through Utopia (1950), which covered much of the same material and, by mingling extracts and synopses, presented a much clearer picture of the Utopian approach...

...They have, for example, by no means exhausted the interesting minor Utopias of the 18th century, and they do not refer to Joseph Dejacque's L'Humanisphere, which is the best of the few anarchist Utopias written in French...

...One can accept two forms of writing as Utopian...

...But few of them had the creative talent to turn their Utopias into imaginative worlds inhabited by credible people...