Universal Classics Library (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Universal Classics Library The term Utopia, as generally used, refers to those ideal states which are impossible of realization, both because they are peopled by ideal human beings uninfluenced by personal jealousies or individual passions, and because they are based, with but little regard for the complexities and varieties of real society, upon what the writer thinks ought to be, rather than upon the collective experience of mankind. More broadly speaking, however, the term need not be confined to these fantastic pictures of impossible societies, or romantic accounts of fictitious states, as they have been called, but may be applied to any social, intellectual, or political scheme which is impracticable at the time when it is conceived and presented. Thus enlarged, the field may be made to include schemes as diverse as More's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun, Cabet's Icarie, and Morris's News from Nowhere, Rousseau's society of the Social Contract, and modern socialistic and communistic organizations, such as the Co-operative Commonwealth of Lawrence Gronlund, popularized by Bellamy in Looking Backward, and Flürcheim's Money Island. Utopias have generally made their appearance during periods of great social and political unrest, and it is, therefore, no accident that after Plato's Republic, written during dark days in the history of Athens, all Utopias should have fallen in the period from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present time. The Middle Ages, with their fixed institutions, their blind faith, and their acceptance of authority were not a suitable seed-ground for the growth of Utopian schemes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.