Utopia book12/23/2023 A lot of utopias had a notion of a common good that includes property held in common. In my study of utopias, this is often the sticking point. More anticipates this when he talks about how there will be little crime in utopia because everything is public business. But the notion of personal privacy, even intellectual or spiritual privacy, soon creeps back in. You can say there is no such thing as private property. But as More surely realized and as soon became apparent in Oneida, you can’t abolish privacy. The Oneida community abolished property, like the utopia More envisioned. “The word means ‘no place,’ a place that does not exist.” He talks about how there is no private interior in Utopia. He talks about how there are no locks on the doors in Utopia, because if you don’t own anything you do not have to protect against theft. More was building on older ideas about an earlier age, an Edenic state, when private property didn’t exist. Thomas More’s Utopia shows you cannot have a utopia without commonality of property. “He talks about how there are no locks on the doors in utopia, because if you don’t own anything you do not have to protect against theft.” So ‘utopia’, from Thomas More’s time onwards, is a place that is predicated on invention. The word means ‘no place,’ a place that does not exist. Tell us about Utopia, the word and the book. Let’s move on to Sir Thomas More, who coined the term utopia in 1515. It seems likely that City of God was part of his background given that Noyes also envisions two distinct cities that will merge one day. For him, the invisible world was a heavenly association of angels that would join with the earth when the Last Judgment came. Noyes does not refer to Augustine in his writing, but I’m sure that City of God was part of his basis for the distinction he made between what he called the visible world of saints from the invisible world of saints. “Utopian projects usually end disastrously.” So he would’ve been versed in biblical scholarship, including Augustine. As an undergraduate he trained in law then he got his divinity license from Yale Theological Seminary. Oneida’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, had a classical education at Dartmouth. Since humans are fallen, by nature, no earthly utopia will ever approach the perfection of the ‘City of God.’ĭid the founders of utopias, particularly Oneida, read all the way back to Augustine? People who have tried to form utopias have always tried to reconcile the ‘City of God’ with the city of men. Augustine seems to envision the ‘City of God’ as something that would be given material manifestation after the Last Judgment. Tell us about Augustine’s City of God.Īugustine’s City of God created the distinction between the ‘City of God,’ which is perfect, and the earthly city, where we live day-to-day. Your first title, from the fifth century, is a cornerstone of Western thought. The idea of a perfect community dates back, at least, to Plato’s Republic. My parents still live in the chateau that the communitarians built for themselves in the 1860s and 1870s. I still have strong connections to Oneida. The community pretty much stayed together-up until the dissolution in 1880-and then turned into a silverware manufacturing company, which was kind of family-owned. My ancestors were the original nucleus of the community. That is where they really started their community in earnest in 1848. When their polyamory was discovered, they were kicked out of Putney and moved to Oneida, New York. Originally they lived in Putney, Vermont. My great great- great-grandparents were the six couples that formed the Oneida community in the 1840s. You have an ancestral attachment to this topic. Utopias help us index and critique contemporary social conditions they open our eyes to the ways in which current ways of organizing are narrow or biased. Utopia generally refers to a positive program for organizing society, but the way they typically envision organizing is either impractical or improbable so utopias usually fail. Utopia is the topic of our discussion and the topic of your book Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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