Utopias of the British Enlightenment

A major collection of tracts from the British utopian tradition.

Gregory Claeys (Edited by)

9780521455909, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 July 1994

350 pages
21.6 x 13.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.492 kg

This is a major collection of eighteenth-century British utopias. Seven tracts, spanning the century, show how the image of the ideal society was used as a form of social criticism, and particularly as a means of focussing on ideas of progress and commercial development. Radical and republican thinking about property ownership, social equality, and commerce and luxury - of particular relevance to the critique of 'corruption' in this period - coexists with nostalgic and conservative notions of the ideal hierarchical community. The introduction, which examines the relationship of these tracts to the political thought of the period, shows how issues and developments of key importance, from the debate surrounding the French Revolution to the origins of Romanticism and early socialism, are illuminated by an understanding of the utopian tradition.

Introduction
1. The island of content
2. A Description of New Athens in Terra Australis Incognita
3. Idea of a perfect commonwealth
4. An account of the first settlement, 5. Laws, form of government, and police, of the Cessares, a people of South America
6. Memoirs of planetes
7. The commonwealth of reason
8. Bruce's voyage to Naples.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]