Human beings, by nature, are utopian. We dream and we hope, and since the dawn of civilization, we have conjured notions of an ideal and perfect existence. From the bucolic realms of the Garden of Eden to Plato’s republic of philosopher-kings, from the island paradise of Thomas More’s Utopia to the libertarian collectives of nineteenth-century America to the counterculture communes of the 1960s, the ways in which utopia has been envisioned have changed dramatically over time. But whatever forms they have taken, utopian ideals have helped drive forward an unfolding process of reinvention, a process whereby humankind has sought, through vision and experimentation, a new and better life. Indeed, utopian visions, and the social experiments they inspired, are a product of our most freely creative faculty, the human imagination. They are an expression of the universal impulse to create the new—to reshape culture and even consciousness itself.

In researching the phenomenon of utopia for this issue of What Is Enlightenment? we consulted surveys, compendia, essays, critiques, and commentaries, and in the process, we discovered the extent to which this perennial human impulse has captured the attention of historians, artists, philosophers, and cultural critics alike. But one particular example of utopian scholarship stood out. Arguably the definitive study of the subject to date, Utopian Thought in the Western World is the product of years of research by an erudite husband-and-wife team, Fritzie P. Manuel and the late Professor Frank E. Manuel. This massive volume traverses five millennia, from the earliest Sumerian myths of a paradise on earth to Teilhard de Chardin’s luminous vision of universal human consciousness. One Amazon.com reviewer deemed it a national treasure. Indeed, it’s rare to encounter a historical work of such breadth and depth, let alone one that illuminates, with such striking nuance and insight, one of the most quintessential and enduring of human proclivities.

When I called Fritzie Manuel to ask if I could interview her, she cautioned me that she had not kept up with the latest innovations in utopian thinking since the 1979 publication of her nine-hundred-page study. She was probably one of the few people, she confessed, who still did not own a computer. And yet a week later as we talked in person, she succeeded in powerfully evoking the utopian impulse as it has shifted and changed over time, and in the process, she brought human history to life. Sitting at her antique dining room table, where she and her husband had traded drafts, edited passages, and haggled over the punctuation of their book, Mrs. Manuel spoke about the historical and human significance of utopia, arcing back and forth across the centuries with remarkable ease and expressing an uncanny connection to the lives and historical realities she was describing.

As we overlooked the wintry Boston cityscape, I learned that a true historian is very much like a true utopian. Both are, as Fritzie Manuel has written, simultaneously “time-bound and free of time, place-bound and free of place.” Indeed, in her hands, five thousand years of history, seen through the lens of utopian thought, become the story of our unfolding humanity—our hopes, our dreams, and the evolution of our very consciousness. Ultimately, the interview with her left me pondering both the past and the future: What new and better existence can and really must emerge as a way to navigate the twenty-first century? Aware of the global-scale challenges we face, it became clear to me why, as the Manuels write, envisioning the next utopia may in fact be our greatest obligation and mission, and nothing less than the “moral need of the age.”

WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT: What is the nature and significance of what you call the “utopian propensity”?

FRITZIE MANUEL: It’s very difficult for me to imagine a world without people who dream, who have a vision of what they would like to see. I can’t think of anyone who would say, “We’ve arrived at a perfect existence, so let’s retain it.” There are always things that are distressing and that we think could be bettered, so we imagine improvements. That impulse has not died out, and if it ever does, I don’t think we’ll have human beings on earth any longer. We’ll have some other form of life, which I can’t imagine.

The utopian propensity is a universal impulse. It’s like thinking or breathing. If we lost our minds and totally stopped thinking, then we would stop dreaming. But as long as we’re conscious, we think, and as long as we think, we’re not totally swallowed up by what’s happening in our everyday lives. We have to think ahead. We have to think of tomorrow. And we not only think about things we hope for ourselves but we also think in terms of society. If we think at all, we think that way. Sometimes we go through periods of discouragement where we don’t see the possibility of evolving to a better society. But those are very black moods and they are not sustained for long. Inevitably, we dream again.

WIE: Where did the term “utopia” come from, and what does it mean?

MANUEL: Utopia is a curious word. It’s elastic; it’s not fixed, and you can use it in any way you like. It’s a shifting-sand name. It means something different today than it did two hundred years ago. And what it meant two hundred years ago is different from what Thomas More meant when he coined the term in the sixteenth century as the title for his famous work Utopia, a literary fantasy about an island paradise. The meaning of utopia changes as we change. You can’t define utopian thinking because it’s transitory. As society changes, people begin to think in different terms.

It’s likely that utopian thinking enters so early on in our evolution that human beings never existed without it. The minute Homo erectus stepped out of the cave, perhaps he was thinking about how nice it would be if there was a cave lady nearby and he didn’t have to go hunt the mammoth down the road. He may have had his paradise ready at his first emergence. He may have had a dream. But it was a different world then, and dreams take on a different quality and a different character as the world goes along. They evolve over time.

In all cases, dreams have to emerge from the way we’re living; they have to have some basis in reality. They can be strange and colorful and exotic, but they still have to link to what exists. We can’t dream the way an ape would dream, if an ape dreams at all. That’s obvious. If you were an Early American colonist, you wouldn’t dream about the same heaven on earth that a Native American, whose life was very different from yours, would imagine. Your utopian image is tethered to what you have lived. It doesn’t really take flight completely, even though it might involve a flight to the moon! But even that arises out of being able to see the moon, which is something you know exists. And the life that you imagine there will have some linkage to what you know on earth. I imagine that the utopian dream of a youngster today would be technologically mad and wild and would take off from what he knows. I’m sure that utopian dreams today are very different from those of my own generation because things are changing so quickly.

Visions of Paradise

WIE: Utopian visions must provide a fascinating window into the nature of human thought and its evolution over time. What did the first recorded utopias depict?

MANUEL: The earliest mythological visions are of a paradise that does not exist on earth. It’s a paradise after death. And they don’t just depict a single person. It’s a vision of a whole lot of people wandering through this beautiful garden and talking to one another. It’s not a solitary paradise; it’s a community. But there’s no connection to reality—immortality was a given, for example. These visions are ethereal. The early utopian thinkers were not social revolutionaries or social activists; they were pure dreamers.

WIE: So the otherworldly quality of these visions suggests that humans are compelled to imagine something other than their actual existence.

MANUEL: Yes, from the very beginning, people thought in terms of realities other than those of everyday life. And that’s apparent in the evolving nature of paradisiacal utopias over time. You have the Garden of Eden, with the earth’s “earliest inhabitants,” Adam and Eve, and there is a sharp difference between the paradise of Eden and what happens after the serpent enters the garden. Then you have the future paradise, the days when the Messiah arrives. There is the “world to come” as compared with the world as it is.

The visions of paradise found in the paintings of fifteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni di Paolo were of literate people—nuns, priests, monks—who were meeting and talking together in a beautiful garden. There was natural beauty, but there was also lofty discourse. You then have the Age of Exploration. What vision of paradise pushed Columbus, for example, to venture out to the New World, and did he think he had come upon it when he reached South America? Because whole new lands and new societies opened up, as compared with the old lands of Europe. What pushes us? Fame? Money? We cannot create any generalities about notions of paradise. But one thing remains: There is a division or a distinction between paradise and what people are facing in everyday living.

WIE: Particularly for our earliest ancestors who were struggling with the hardships of existence, visions of paradise must have provided comfort, relief, and security in a very uncertain world.

MANUEL: I don’t think that’s unique to the early period—paradisiacal myths are meaningful for people today. People can put up with extraordinary miseries if they’re thinking about the rewards they’ll have in the future. You could say that that kind of relationship to paradise is, in a way, anti-utopian or counter-utopian, because it can lead to a very lethargic state, a state so lethargic that you don’t even think about what could constitute a better world here and now. You’re totally involved in dreaming of another world.

Bringing Heaven to Earth

WIE: Is there a point at which the nature of utopia shifts and is no longer primarily about escaping to another world?

MANUEL: The sense that you could create utopia here in this world starts with the work of Thomas More in the early sixteenth century. You don’t get that earlier on. Even a hundred years earlier, utopia was much more otherworldly. But with Thomas More, man rather than God is now conjuring life on earth. The idea of utopia is More’s invention, and it’s very much linked to the life he’s actually living in the sixteenth century. It takes off from there. He doesn’t think that his utopia will take place after you die and get resurrected. It becomes concentrated on this world.

More thinks in terms of a whole society with nice proper gardens and decent relationships, which he describes in detail. He thinks it through. And he’s laughing; he’s enjoying it, but he’s serious, too, because he is well aware of the faults of the society in which he lives. He is critiquing the Tudor monarchy of King Henry VIII, and it is a very shaky monarchy. All sorts of things are happening, and More is very much a man of ideals, principles, and faith. After all, he gets beheaded because he upholds his allegiance to the Catholic Church and breaks with the king, which is ultimately recognized; and eventually he is canonized as a saint. He was a brilliant man, a very well educated man, a man who not only thinks ahead but acts on it. For example, he has his daughters educated. He stands out in his world. Thomas More was a different kind of dreamer.

WIE: You said earlier that the nature of utopia changes as culture changes. What was it about More’s time and culture that gave rise to such a dramatic change in utopian thinking?

MANUEL: People were beginning to explore the life of the mind and the riches that were around them, not in terms of gold and jewelry but the riches of scholarship, of thought. They were interested in whatever they could find in history, and this went along with opening up the New World, with finding out about other races. They were finding civilizations in both North and South America that they didn’t know existed. Columbus discovers the New World at the end of the fifteenth century, and very shortly after that, Thomas More writes Utopia. So there’s a confluence of a lot of things—the artistic world, the literary world, the geographic world. An enrichment takes place, and that gives birth to a new thinking, a new dreaming. This is the birth of humanism, and of course, the religious world starts getting hacked away.

WIE: From what you’re describing, it’s clear why the sixteenth century set the stage for the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment periods that follow—a pivotal time when science, human reason, and discovery overshadowed institutionalized religion. Did the notion of utopia change during this next period, and if so, how?

MANUEL: The seventeenth-century utopians, such as Sir Francis Bacon, were imbued with a different spirit. Virtually all of them were men of action who believed that their plans could and would be crowned with success within a foreseeable, not a distant, future. The New Atlantis, which Francis Bacon wrote in 1626, is hardly a popular utopia of social regeneration, as was Thomas More’s. Its purpose lies elsewhere. In The New Atlantis, Bacon introduced science into human thinking, and he had a very clear and interesting conception of how science should be employed. Of course, you had scientists before Bacon—Copernicus, for example. But Francis Bacon is the father of scientific thinking. He was setting things forth, using his imagination and then checking on that imagination, measuring, changing, and testing. Bacon wasn’t just dreaming; he was working things out scientifically. He was developing a practical way to arrive at conclusions, so he used The New Atlantis to help introduce the scientific method into society, to alter the thinking of the time. And he was obviously an imaginative, brilliant man.

Creating a new society

WIE: Were the imaginary utopian worlds of Thomas More and Francis Bacon actually enacted by people? And were they even intended to be?

MANUEL: For utopian visions to take root and influence the course of history, you had to have a population—more than a few philosophes—that could enact them. Utopia had to be more than someone’s reverie. A utopian thinker in the seventeenth century, for example, had nobody on whom to pin his thinking. He was isolated, not from his fellow philosophes but from the great masses of people who were barely making a living and were thus unaware of what he was envisioning.

That begins to change with the Industrial Revolution and the shifting economic and world systems. You begin to have a population that can think. People begin to find their voices. They begin to become aware of themselves, to know who they are. Working people of the period come closer to philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was articulating utopian visions. As a result, these thinkers begin to stir things up in a way that hadn’t happened before. The French Revolution led to emancipation and the rise of a middle class. And it was happening in the American colonies as well—the Declaration of Independence is a utopian document. It wasn’t just somebody’s dream—you have a mass uprising and different classes of people begin to have authority. These people become part of a utopian vision of the future, and utopian ideals actually begin to take flesh. That’s when you see a change in the thinking, the wishing, and ultimately the working of utopian thinkers.

WIE: If large numbers of people can now engage directly with utopian thinking and act upon these visions, how does that change the nature of utopianism?

MANUEL: In the nineteenth century, a much broader utopian thinking emerges that concentrates on creating a whole new society. Important utopian thinkers from the period included Charles Fourier and Henri Saint-Simon in France and Robert Owen in England. Their visions were not merely dreams of the future. They were meant to be adopted by groups, by cells, by societies—and they were.

Fourier and Owen were the two major early-nineteenth-century apostles of the small-community movement. They had confidence that a single successful experiment based on their principles of organization would provide an example so compelling that it would persuade the rest of humankind to adopt their systems. On the other hand, the main thrust of the Saint-Simon movement was not directed toward establishing small communities but was rather a total reorganization of the whole scientific-technological society. He began to think in much bigger terms and also in very specific terms, down to the kind of roadways he wanted to see. To join the Saint-Simon movement was an act of commitment to the future progress of man—a world of order and limitless progress in the flowering of all capacities, a world virtually without pain, a world of love and cohesiveness. The movement, the religion, was the new world in miniature.

WIE: We often believe that gender equality and civil rights emerged largely in Western culture during the 1960s. But I was surprised to discover how progressive the nineteenth-century utopian thinkers were. They really were pioneers in terms of human rights, sexual freedom, and equal opportunity.

MANUEL: Oh yes. They concerned themselves with work and labor arrangements and with love too. Even prior to the nineteenth century, utopians wanted to see changes in sexual mores. It’s also true for the rights of women; the early feminists had to be utopians in the dreamiest sense because it was really, really tough for women back then.

WIE: We think of the “radical sixties” as a time of cultural upheaval and change, with many younger people pursuing alternative lifestyles. However, you point out in your book that these counterculture experiments were often not as novel or “utopian” as the communities that emerged over a century earlier.

MANUEL: Yes, I think that’s true. There were many groups that got together in the sixties, but I didn’t think of them as utopian. We were living in New York in Greenwich Village at the time, and they were protesting against the Vietnam War. But from what I could tell, they didn’t seem interested in truly creating a better world. Some of them got on relief rolls in New York, and I thought, “This is wrong. Those relief rolls should be serving the poor people who need help.” And very often these kids came from wealthy families and took money from their parents as well, so I was suspicious of them.

In one respect, these groups were similar to the communities of the mid-nineteenth century—they tried to live lives that were very different from the society around them. But I think the nineteenth-century communities had different ideals. They wanted freedom, but not drug-induced freedom or freedom derived from being irresponsible. And they didn’t place themselves in direct opposition to the society at large. There was isolation and separation, but not attack, as there was in the 1960s. The nineteenth-century groups were trying to reform society, not reject it. That’s a generalization, but I think there’s some validity to it. I don’t remember any reforming zeal in the 1960s. They were thumbing their noses at society at the same time that they were using the luxuries of the world they were criticizing. That doesn’t go for everyone, but it goes for many. The flower kids were also organizing communities on the West Coast, and they obviously wanted individual freedoms that my generation didn’t have. I suspect they were thinking about society as a whole, but I was curious to know if these groups were merely seeking refuge from a society that seemed cold and headed in the wrong direction or if they really wanted to change this world.

The Utopian Prospect

WIE: Reflecting back on the twentieth century, humanity chose catastrophic and ruinous directions. The Holocaust is a prime example. Hitler’s popularity, it seems, was due to the fact that he appealed to the utopian impulse in Germans to create an ideal society of the Master Race. Would you consider Nazism to be a utopian vision?

MANUEL: It wasn’t a utopia because it was based only on destruction. The same is true with Fascism. It was a question of cleaning up the old society by killing off a whole lot of people. I did at one point read Mein Kampf, but I didn’t learn anything from it, and I don’t consider Hitler a thinker. He talked about some of the German philosophers such as Schlegel, but I don’t think they were meaningful to him. He was just grasping at something. I don’t think he was utopian in his thinking at all, because he was not interested in building a new society.

WIE: These days you hear a lot about “dystopia” rather than utopia.

MANUEL: Immediately after World War II, dystopian novels sold more copies than any literary utopian works in memory. Dystopia portrays the future as a living hell. You have apocalyptic visions of human beings overpopulating the earth and clawing one another for survival, of nuclear disaster, of escaped pathogenic bodies heedlessly being created by experimental scientists. Yet out of these visions, the utopian propensity shows signs of stirring again, because at the heart of a dystopia has to be a utopia. You say, “This is awful. This is terrible. We’re going in the wrong direction.” But you’re saying that because you think there’s the possibility that it can change. If you didn’t think there was that possibility, you wouldn’t bother. Aldous Huxley, author of the ironic dystopian Brave New World, lived to write the utopian Island. The impulse behind a dystopia is really utopian.

WIE: You have written that utopians are actually the true realists.

MANUEL: Yes. For one thing, they know what would be good for the world. And they know that you have to have an ideal before you can move toward it. So they’re realists in that sense. Those who merely accept what is are really the nonrealists because they’re denying that the world is going to change, that the world moves. But what direction the world moves in is another story. And if you have no goal toward which you hope it will move, no goal you’re pushing toward, then you’re accepting everything that’s bad and you don’t need to. The utopian thinkers of the past were often far in advance of their societies, and it’s good to know about them. Of course, sometimes the societies that were founded on their ideas didn’t work out that well. That’s certainly true of Marx, for example. But that, too, gets corrected in time.

WIE: By new utopias?

MANUEL: By new utopias. Because if you’re alive and you’re a thinking person, then you have to hope for something, even if you’re not very optimistic that it will be achieved. You still want to work for it. You want to better this world, and you have the feeling not only that it needs to be bettered but that it can be—that its evolutionary fate is ultimately to be better. Therefore you have to align yourself with those who think similarly and not with those who either have given up or think that the world begins and ends with them. I’m sure there are millions of people who feel as I do. Or is that just part of my utopian thinking? I don’t know.

I do have days when I’m pessimistic. I have days when I want to pick up the New York Times and throw it across the room. But basically I think the same way that I always have—with skepticism about our capacity to change the world for the better, but not with pessimism. I have the feeling that there’s something you can do to prod the forces that will lead to change. Deep down that remains. I think I’m still a utopian.

WIE: What’s next for utopia? What is the future of utopia in the twenty-first century?

MANUEL: Life today is different, and the province of the utopians is changing. They’re not worried about sexual freedom anymore. Economic ideals still move utopians, but they are moving other people too. Issues that were once utopian have become common objectives; they’ve been gobbled up by the Democrats, who are no longer called utopian! So utopians are really hard-put today, don’t you think? For instance, would you call the ideal of world peace utopian thinking? I don’t think so. This has almost become a world ideal, whether you think it’s possible or not. What was once specific to utopians has now spread to entire populations, linking what used to be utopian with the life of humanity.

You don’t need a vast number of people to destroy the planet anymore, and that puts utopians in a different position altogether. There’s talk of the end of humankind. In the nineteenth century, that would have been considered crazy. But people who think in those terms are not considered wild dreamers anymore. Utopian thinking now has to do with the preservation of the human race. Utopians in the twenty-first century are those who think we can preserve the world. And it’s not one class or society; it’s all of humanity. So utopians are no longer simply isolated in little enclaves of their own. Without the whole world to back them, their ideals can’t move into a practical phase. We all have to become utopian because we all have to believe we can preserve the world. And if we don’t, we should give up right now and go into a cave, or pray, or just think, or spend our time knitting. The alternative is the end. That sounds gloomy.

WIE: No, surprisingly it doesn’t. It sounds as if you’re actually being a utopian—a realist. And it also speaks to the deepest part of our humanity.

MANUEL: Yes, it really does, doesn’t it? The whole world has been turned around in an odd sort of way, and so has utopianism. I don’t think anything cosmic is going to happen during my lifetime, but I don’t know what’s going to happen during yours. I’ll have to see you in the other world to find out. Can you have life after death if the world is destroyed?

WIE: I can’t even imagine the world being destroyed. It’s too horrendous.

MANUEL: I can’t imagine it either, just as I can’t imagine what existed before the universe was born. How do you conceive of a non-future? I can’t, really.

WIE: That’s the utopian propensity itself, isn’t it?

MANUEL: Yes. It is!