ABSTRACT
The utopian novel, as a literary form, has proved an excellent vehicle for concepts of "The Good Life" or "The Good Society"; or again for criticism of the existing society by caricature or dissection of current practices and concepts in the sort of satire with which people are familiar through the works of Swift and Voltaire. The anti-Utopia characteristic of the own century might be considered as a subdivision of utopian satire. Lewis Mumford in his Story of Utopias exaggerates when he writes of nineteenth-century Utopias as being "all machinery", but he is not far off. The anti-utopians have seen the triumph of machinery, of automation, of rational development, of the general over the particular. Until the twentieth century, no large-scale attempts had been made to carry out utopian concepts. There was the abortive reign of the Anabaptists in Munster; there were the programs of the Enlightened Despots — limited in scope and even more so in achievement.
