ABSTRACT
The freedom to conceive of nature normatively is one of the marks of the Utopian imagination. Writers as different from one another as More, Bacon, Rabelais, Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Ruskin regarded nature as a normative basis for judgment. Though these writers had biases characteristic of their respective times, their naturalism represents a universal ingredient in Utopian thinking. Even in Christian thought the natural depravity of man is counteracted by a natural innocence which can be recovered.1 I f one considers contemporary nightmare Utopias in which the Utopian impulse is satirized, one finds that the satirist has discovered within the so-called Utopia its own antithesis. Huxley and Orwell do little more than show that Utopia is after all not Utopia; it has become anti-natural and anti-human.2
